The Everyday Innovator Podcast for Product Managers

According to my guest, "Marketing at its heart is starting a conversation with someone who could be an ideal customer." Of course, then my first question is how do we find the ideal customer for a product or service. Thankfully, my guest, Tom Schwab, had some ideas. Tom is the founder of Interview Valet and his previous background is in medical device products. In this interview you will learn: - Why marketing should start with the customer, - How to identify the ideal customer, and - What we can learn from the ideal customer for a product.

TEI 093: Identifying the ideal customer – with Tom Schwab

Research and development is tightly coupled with product management and innovation. To learn how an R&D person thinks about innovation, I talked with Dana A. Oliver, who has 30 impressive years of experience in R&D groups. He now focuses on writing and coaching, after leaving Medtronic, the medical device company, where he was the Senior Director of R&D. He has also written two books. His first is Mantra Leadership and his second and most recent is Mantra Design. In Mantra Design he shares 14 principles, or mantras, for innovation and developing premium priced, patent protected, and market share leading products. We discuss a few of his mantras and then explore the future of R&D. The mantras discussed include: -Innovate, Buy or Die -Learn Your Customer’s World! -Innovation begins with the Eye -It Takes a Long Tim to Get to Simple

TEI 092: Innovation mantras from R&D-with Dana A. Oliver

Listen to the Interview This episode is about virtual teams. Many of us are part of virtual teams and we have felt the pain of virtual teams that don’t work well. Virtual teams are becoming more common in organizations and especially product management and innovation where the product team is often scattered across multiple time zones. I found someone who has worked with and learned from hundreds of virtual teams. He is currently the PMO manager at Cisco Systems, where he leads virtual teams all around the world. He is also the author of two Amazon best-selling books. The first one is Influencing Virtual Teams: 17 Tactics That Get Things Done with Your Remote Employees. His most recent book is Don’t Reply All: 18 Email Tactics That Help You Write Better Emails and Improve Communication with Your Team. His name is Hassan Osman. In the interview we focus on: * the nature of virtual teams, * building trust, and * what you need to do to run an effective virtual team meeting.   Practices and Ideas for Product Managers and Innovators Summary of questions discussed: * What are virtual teams? A virtual team is simply a team that is spread across either time or physical location, or both. It would have been a lot easier to recognize a virtual team 15-20 years ago, when email and internet was starting out. However, today, I could argue that every single team is a virtual team. Let me give you an example. I have a friend who is the CEO of a startup company in Cambridge. They have an office in Harvard Square. One room is a big open floor space where everyone is sitting facing the wall. I said to him, “It must be really cool if you need to ask one of your team members to do something for you. You just swivel in your chair and yell it out.” And he said, “Well actually, no.” He sends them an email. I found that a little bit intriguing and asked why. He shared that it is easier to track what information was exchanged than relying on the verbal interactions and that it avoided interruptions. Even though the team members sit next to each other, they are interacting as a virtual team.   * What are some of the common issues encountered managing virtual teams? Simple issues for some virtual teams are dealing with different time zones and speaking accents. Another can be the lack of facial expressions and body language cues. Obviously when you’re dealing with either asynchronous communication, such as IM or email, you’re not getting that flavor of the nonverbal communication. That can result in miscommunication or misinterpretation of intent, which could create conflict. Using webcams, for example, can help. Another thing that really affects virtual teams is that lack of cohesion. We as human beings are very social in nature, and with virtual teams, you may be working alone much of the time. You don’t have the same level of interaction that you have with co-located physical teams.   * What are your experiences building trust in virtual teams? Trust is a very nebulous concept. It’s not like an on-off switch where you either have trust or you don’t have trust. It’s more of a spectrum where there’s varying degrees of trust among the team and among managers and their direct employees. So it becomes this very tough thing to manage, right? Because it’s very tough to manage, it’s very hard to kind of nail down. How do you define it? Trust is equal to reliability plus likeability. Meaning, if you want to increase trust among your team, you either have to increase reliability, or increase likeability, or both. Reliability is the simple concept that judges if a person who has been given a job can actually do that job. Do they have the proper skill set to actually accomplish what they need to accomplish? But the other factor, the likeability factor,

TEI 091: How product managers can influence virtual teams – with Hassan Osman

We have explored the topic of product portfolio management in previous episodes, but not from an Agile perspective. That is the topic for this episode – Agile portfolio management. Each week I talk with a savvy insider to help us understand an aspect of product management and innovation. This time my guest is one of the very first Certified Scrum Trainers, who has been implementing Scrum in organizations for more than a decade and has another decade of experience in software technology. He is also a Principle at SolutionsIQ, a firm that helps organizations adopt Agile practices. In this episode, product managers and innovators will learn: * the difference between product portfolio management and Agile portfolio management, * how to create Agile portfolios, * how to navigate some of the common issues encountered with Agile portfolio management, * and the importance of keeping high-performing teams intact.   Practices and Ideas for Product Managers and Innovators Summary of questions discussed: * What is Agile portfolio management? We need to start by defining business agility, which is leveraging iterative delivery capability and actively managing organization investments. Long term investments often get the focus but we need to be able to more quickly adjust short-term investments. As the business environment is changing more quickly, we need to be able to respond more quickly. We need to recognize that a few mistakes will be made along the way. We need to be able to adjust our shorter term commitments more quickly. That helps us think about Agile portfolio management, where we still have longer-term investments but also the need to adjust more quickly in the shorter term.   * How do you apply an Agile mindset to portfolio management? Agile emphasizes small intact teams. Teams that stay together out-perform teams that are broken apart when a project ends and then rebuilt for another project. This is an important influence of Agile on portfolio management and how project resources are used. Also, technologists need to be involved in portfolio management decisions or you can expect bad decisions to be made. The implication of technology-related decisions need to be incorporated into portfolio decisions. Further, portfolios need to be smaller to move the decision making closer to those best equipped to be involved in the decisions. This suggests that a portfolio of portfolios is needed in organizations so we can move authority and accountability down into the organization.   * How can an Agile portfolio be constructed? Start with considering the right size for a portfolio, which can lead organizations to realize they need a portfolio of portfolios. Portfolios are better managed if they are not too large. At the other extreme, not every organization needs a portfolio and portfolio management should be resisted until it is actually needed. An example would be an organization that only has one product. They should enjoy being able to focus on product management without adding complexities by incorporating portfolio management. A portfolio reflects a supply and demand balance and the supply-side constrains the portfolios, which is the capacity of knowledge workers. These employees cannot be easily exchanged and their availability provides the opportunities and constraints. Portfolios should be constructed around value streams. To determine the right size for portfolios and how Agile portfolios should be constructed, use these 5 simple rules (see related blog post below in the Useful Links section): * All work is forced ranked. * Operate on “good enough” data. * Near-term capacity is fixed. * Each unique value-based delivery capability has a portfolio * Each portfolio has one “intake system.”  

TEI 090: Agile product portfolio management- with Brent Barton

Are there times that product managers need to be disobedient – not do what they were asked to do? To explore the topic I spoke with Bob McGannon who has great experience with this through the lens of project management. As the purpose of a project is to develop a product or service, product managers and innovators have much they can learn from the field of project management. Bob is vice-president of Mindavation, a company that focuses on helping businesses increase their capabilities in portfolio, program, and project management. Bob has set up project management programs on three continents. He has 25 years of IT, project management, and project analysis experience, 18 of those years with IBM. In the discussion you’ll learn: - the value of project management, - three key project management skills product managers must have, - what intelligent disobedience is, and - how product managers can exercise intelligent disobedience.

TEI 089: Intelligent disobedience for product managers-with Bob McGannon

My son got to meet his heroes. Not sport players, astronauts, or Marvel comics’ characters. He met the people behind Youth Digital, his favorite source for online tech courses. We traveled to their headquarters in Chapel Hills, North Carolina. What they are all about is creating the next generation of creators, focused on kids ages 8 to 14. My son discovered their courses when he was 10 and he is devouring them as fast as he can, learning about Java programming, 3D graphics and animation, computer game design, and more - and frequently laughing in the process. While at their office we had the opportunity to talk with Justin Richards, the CEO and founder of Youth Digital, and Aaron Sharp, the head of Product Development. The interview serves two purposes. We explore the product management aspects of the company and I expect product managers and innovators will find the topics useful. We also discuss another topic I love - preparing the next generation to be leaders in technology and innovation - which is something their products are all about. Most of us have kids in our lives, whether they be nephews and nieces, our own children, or other children we influence and because of this, I want you to know about the work Youth Digital is doing.

TEI 088: Product management for preparing the next generation of innovation leaders- with Youth Digital

I enjoyed a wonderful conversation with Saeed Khan. He started the On Product Management blog and has been a career product manager, working in Toronto, Canada and Silicon Valley. He is also a frequent speaker at product management events, including ProductCamps. I saw a presentation Saeed did on the topic of successfully using product management metrics. I wanted to explore this topic with him along with what else it takes to be a good product manager, which is what we did in this discussion. In the interview Saeed shares four categories of metrics and his 6-stage product model: - Build It, - Nail It, - Scale It, - Extend It, - Milk It, and - End It.

TEI 087: Metrics and successful product management – with Saeed Khan

You’ve likely heard of the curse of knowledge or sometimes it is called the curse of the expert. It occurs when our knowledge leads us down predictable paths, likely not considering other possible solutions to problems but only those that are familiar to us. This is cognitive bias and is the topic I asked my guest about, which lead to discussing open innovation and how to manufacture serendipity. His name is Kevin Stark and he is the VP of Technology Solutions at NineSigma, a global innovation firm. They have helped Kraft, NFL, NASA, L’Oréal, Unilever, PepsiCo, Pfizer and other companies create an open innovation workplace, leading to breakthrough products. As you will hear towards the end of the interview, many of these companies share their stories using open innovation on the NineSights website - a great resource for learning what they did. The link is below. In this discussion, product managers can learn: - how to identify and avoid cognitive bias, - how to create an open innovation workplace, - problems to anticipate and avoid.