The Everyday Innovator Podcast for Product Managers

TEI 102: Executive coaching for product managers – with Evan Roth

I've been fortunate to have excellent mentors at different times during my career. I've seen an interesting trend in the last few years - the rise of the personal coach. This is a type of mentor. A personal coach can help you in many ways, all of which are generally related to improving performance and success -- identifying objectives, holding you accountable for taking action, providing unbiased feedback, and at times just helping you get out of your own way by identifying how you're limiting your success. Recently I was talking with the head of product for a global company and he mentioned he had been meeting with a coach. I was curious about this because I noticed a change in him and I asked how the coach helped. His response made me more curious and I wanted to talk with his coach myself, which I do in this interview. My guest is Evan Roth, a certified executive coach that works with both individual executives and as well as their teams. Evan has 30+ years' real-world corporate experience in leadership and organizational development, accounting and finance, business strategy, mergers and acquisitions, and international operations. He happens to be based in Denver, Colorado, near my home, but thanks to Skype, he works with clients across the globe. In our discussion, you will learn about: - limiting beliefs, - assumptions and interpretations, - my personal example of being in quicksand, and - how to have more energy.

TEI 101: 9 traits of highly innovative people- with Tamara Kleinberg

Listen to the Interview I’m a big believer in people playing to their strengths, and this includes product team members and others involved in innovation. Not everyone has the same strengths – if we did, that would be a bit boring. Realizing how people approach innovation and their strengths is something Tamara Kleinberg accomplishes. Tamara has spent more years than she’ll admit brimming with ideas and launching and running entrepreneurial businesses. She is known for her ability to innovate from ideation to implementation and has brought to market products for very large brands. For the past 18 years she has advised companies such as Disney, Procter & Gamble, General Mills and Otterbox on fostering innovative ideas and people. She has run multi-million dollar businesses and launched a few of her own, including Launch Street, which provides resources for entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs. In the interview, we discuss nine traits of innovators and how to identify the trait(s) that is your strength. The traits are: * Collaborative * Experiential * Futuristic * Fluid * Imaginative * Inquisitive * Instinctual * Risk Taker * Tweaker   Also, you will learn the two most important things to say after you present a new idea.   Practices and Ideas for Product Managers and Innovators Summary of some questions discussed: * What is the backstory on your Innovation Quotient Edge? The Innovation Quotient Edge (IQE) is the culmination of 20+ years of work and experience. I started my career in brand strategy and innovation in New York City in a big firm and in advertising on Madison Avenue. Then I branched off, with most of my work being in new product development for Fortune 500 consumer goods companies—Procter and Gamble, General Mills, Clorox, etc. Time and again I would hand innovative ideas to these brilliant people in these great companies. Yet a lot of them wouldn’t make it to market. Their ability to be innovative and drive change they needed to get the results was suffering. So I stepped back and thought about what was occurring. I always believed that if we did one or two things, we’d all be innovative. But in my work and research, what I actually discovered blew my assumptions out the door, about how innovation works. What I discovered is that we’re all innovative, but how we innovate is unique to each of us. In fact, there are nine human triggers of innovation and the combination of your top two triggers make your unique innovator profile.   * What are the nine traits? The image  below provides a good summary of the nine traits. Listen to the interview to hear details about each.   What is the language of innovation? When we present ideas we often force people into a yes or no vote. We share the idea and ask “What do you think?” Most people hate ideas that are new. We are programmed to poke holes in them. Instead, when presenting a new idea, ask: * “What would you do to strengthen this idea?” and then * “What holes do you see and how would you fill them?”   Useful links: * Special resources from Tamara just for listeners, diving deeper into the Language of Innovation. * Tamara’s website * How entrepreneurs elevate communities and change the world: Tamara G. Kleinberg at TEDxCSU * Connect with Tamara on LinkedIn   Innovation Quote “The arrogance of success is to think that what you did yesterday will be s...

TEI 100: Celebrating 100 episodes for product managers – with host Chad McAllister

Welcome to the 100th episode of The Everyday Innovator podcast. I have a little something different for this episode, being this is kind of a big milestone, the 100th episode. I don’t have a guest today, and I’ll tell you more about that in the episode recording. For the 100th episode, I cover four topics: - An opportunity to get The Everyday Innovator coffee cup. - Learning from self-reflection to increase your empathy and influence, using my self-reflection as an example. - Why the podcast and blog is named The Everyday Innovator. - Answers to product manager questions: advice for new product managers, where product management is heading, and why launches go bad.

Have you ever wondered why some people earn attention and respect when they speak and others don't? According to my guest, the secret to their success can be summed up in one word: gravitas. With gravitas, you can express yourself clearly and with the passion and confidence to persuade, influence and engage listeners. And that is exactly a capability product managers and innovators need. My guest is Caroline Goyder, who has worked for many years as a voice teacher at the Central School of Speech and Drama in London. She spent the last decade developing a system to help her non-acting clients perform with poise, presence and power. She has been named one of Britain’s top coaches. And, her passion is helping people from all walks of life sound, and feel their best. From the interview, you will learn: - What it means to speak with gravitas. - Why anyone can learn to speak more persuasively. - How to speak truth to power – in a way that influences senior managers and leaders.

I have a great guest for us to learn from – the author of a new book, The Agenda Mover: When Your Good Idea Is Not Enough. Doesn’t that sum up the challenge of being a product manager – when your good idea is not enough. My guest, Professor Samuel B. Bacharach, argues that in order to implement any innovation — no matter how great your idea — that you must be an “agenda mover.”  He’s analyzed how leaders such as Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Martin Luther King, Jr. have been able to turn their ideas into action.  He has also spent years teaching the skills that enable people to move agendas. Today he helps leaders of Fortune 500 companies apply the steps to move their ideas forward. He is also an organizational behavior professor at Cornell University and the co-founder of the Bacharach Leadership Group. Practices and Ideas for Product Managers and Innovators Summary of some questions discussed: * In your latest book you shared “If you cannot move your agenda, you are not a leader.” What do you mean by that?  We tend to over-dramatize what we mean by leaders and what it takes to innovate. We live in a culture where we tend to see leadership as a heroic quality, the charismatic person like the Lone Ranger who is coming to save you. That’s total nonsense. We should begin with the assumption that all leaders are individuals trying to get some action taken, to move something forward. This being the case, the litmus test in leadership is what you get done.  How many leaders do you remember for ideas they had or simply for their charisma? What gets remembered is their capacity to move the ideas forward. Thomas Edison once said, “A good idea without execution is hallucination.” Well, that’s my notion. Can you move the idea? Can you execute? There is no leadership without it. * The challenge with innovation is it means change – and change brings fear. How do leaders address the fear of change — of something new? This is the $64,000 question. If you begin with the assumption, which is a premier assumption, that people will resist change, the issue quickly becomes more complicated than initially suspected.  I’ll elaborate on that — you see, opposing innovation and opposing change is like opposing apple pie, even when there’s not a lot of sugar in it! No one ever comes and tells you, “This is the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard. Forget it.” And no one tells you in the corporate world, “We’re against change, forget it.” It’s a lot subtler than that. People resist by playing a game of, “Yes, but did you think about this…” Given that there’s room to play this game, it demands from you, as someone trying to move change and innovation, that you seriously anticipate the possible resistance. That means you need to methodically understand arguments of resistance. There are not many arguments people can make against you. Further, you can develop the skills to justify and move your agenda. You must begin to really work on getting the buy-in. And you can’t drop the ball – you must take action to sustain the momentum. * What are the skills for moving your agenda? When I talk about skills, I’m talking about the capacity to anticipate, mobilize, negotiate, and sustain momentum. These are things you can actually learn. We’ve trained people all around the world in these skills, and some of them were the least charismatic people you could think of. You examine what are you really trying to do in any setting. What are we really trying to do? You are trying to get someone to shift their priorities to align them, at least in some capacity, with your priorities. You’re trying to get someone to shift their resources to support what you’re trying to do. It’s going to happen because you were methodical and deeply understood the perspectives and needs of those you want to influence.

The topic of this episode is another in a series of interviews I’m doing focused on the four skills that enable a 25% higher income for product managers and increasing their influence. The 4 skills were discussed back in episode 073 and include: * Pitch artist – the ability to present and sell your ideas and conclusions. * Exec debater — being the president of the product and standing up for what is needed and challenging executive teams. * Inspire others — great products are built by great teams but these aren’t necessarily teams that product managers personally manage. Instead, product managers need to inspire them and share the vision of the product. * Truth to power – being good at raising inconvenient truths and not running away from an unpopular message. This interview focuses on being a pitch artist and my guest, Chris Westfall, is a world-class pitch artist – having won the US National Elevator Pitch Championship. He is also the official “pitch coach” at the fifth-largest university in the United States, where his strategies have helped raise millions of dollars for student start-ups, launching over 50 businesses and creating hundreds of jobs. He’s coached clients onto Shark Tank, Shark Tank Australia and Dragon’s Den, and successfully re-branded products and services around the globe. His message to product managers and organizations to understand the new rules of engagement is simple: use authentic persuasion that’s not pushy, “sales-y” or fake. In this interview, you’ll learn about: * when pitches are important, * why product managers must be good pitch artists, and * how to give a good pitch. Practices and Ideas for Product Managers and Innovators Summary of questions discussed: * How did winning the US National Elevator Pitch Championship impact you? I was surprised and thrilled. The recognition really started me on a path to share the skills that I’ve developed over the course of my career and the knowledge I gained based on a great deal of research. I wanted to help others engineer persuasive conversations. That’s really what my work has been about since receiving the honor. * When are pitches important? Anytime you want to persuade someone is the time to prepare a pitch. Someone could mean your boss, the people on your team, a person that you’re meeting for the first time who could have an impact on your business or your life. It also means influencing the people and the relationships that matter most to you. Maybe that’s your wife, your boyfriend,  or your kids. The idea that a pitch just happens in an elevator or that it’s 30 seconds long is a myth. It’s an artificial construct. What’s real and what happens every day, is there are people looking at you and they’re wondering, what is it that we might be able to do together? What are your ideas, and if you have great ideas, those ideas deserve to be heard properly. Having a pitch is really nothing more than understanding how to have a persuasive conversation. * How can product managers construct an effective pitch? All pitches are about change. If a product manager is pitching an idea, that is about change too. Constructing and delivering an effective pitch follows these steps: * Start with your listener or audience – understand what is in their best interest. The context always trumps content. * Consider what they haven’t heard before – what would be surprising or unexpected to them. People listen more closely to the unexpected and are more likely to give you a “tell me more” response. * Contemplate the questions that you hope you get asked and those you hope you don’t get asked.

This episode is about market research - what's in your toolbox for conducting consumer and market research? Does it include Conjoint Analysis? Well, if not, it will after you listen to this episode. To explore the topic and walk through an example of using Conjoint Analysis, I tracked down a previous guest, way back in episode 008. In that episode we discussed quantitative and qualitative research tools but didn't go into details about applying Conjoint. My guest is Brian Ottum, a market research specialist with 30 years experience in new product development. He started as a chemical engineer and joined Procter Gamble, contributing to Charmin, Pampers, and other products you know. He went on to earn a PhD in Market Research. Today, he helps companies with product development. He has also developed a new online course called “Tools for Early Innovation.” It’s a little over an hour of videos, case studies and downloadable materials. The usual price is $30 but he is making it available to listeners of this podcast for just $10 for a limited time – until the end of January, 2017. See the link section below to get the discount. In this interview, you’ll learn about: - the types of information Conjoint Analysis can provide, such as pricing specifics, - when to use Conjoint, and - the specific steps for using Conjoint.

TEI 096: Conjoint analysis for product managers- with Brian Ottum, PhD

The last episode was on the topic of product roadmaps and today we extend that topic by considering product line roadmaps - roadmaps for product lines and product families. The person who has turned that topic into his professional career is Paul O’Connor. He is the founder and managing director of The Adept Group and he has had significant impact on the field of new product development over the past thirty years. During this time, he has developed and implemented a number of innovative approaches to creativity, innovation, and productivity in NPD. He is truly one of the savvy insiders that can go both board and deep on many topics related to new product development. In this interview, you’ll learn about: What is a product line and a product line strategy, How are platforms related to product lines, How product line roadmaps differ from product roadmaps, and Why product line roadmapping is important.

TEI 095: Product line roadmapping for product managers – with Paul O’Connor

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

TEI 094: Creating product roadmaps for product managers – with Jim Semick