The Everyday Innovator Podcast for Product Managers

TEI 086: Manufacturing serendipity, open innovation, and product management – with Kevin Stark, PhD

Product managers often work in diverse teams and need good team management skills to be successful. To explore managing teams, I invited a frequent keynote speaker and coach who companies invite to teach them about improving teams and their work. He is Dr. Todd Dewett, a best-selling author, popular trainer on Lynda.com, a TEDx speaker, and an Inc. Top 100 leadership speaker. His latest book is Show Your Ink: Stories About Leadership and Life. He is also a former award-winning professor who has since spoken to and advised hundreds of thousands of professionals around the world. When you listen to the interview you will no doubt hear that he has huge enthusiasm for helping people. In this discussion, product managers can learn: -the value of feedback, -leading when you have no actual authority, -conflict management, and -two actions for being a better team leader.

TEI 085: Managing product teams – with Todd Dewett, PhD

Product portfolio management is concerned with selecting the right products to develop, making trade-off decisions, and generally maximizing the value of the product portfolio. It is an important activity in organizations that have more than one product, but it is also an activity that is difficult to learn about. I sought to find an expert who could discuss what is really involved. That expert is Carrie Nauyalis, the NPD Solution Evangelist for Planview. Carrie began her career at Planview implementing portfolio management solutions and training clients around the world. She has the experience and knowledge to know what is involved in product portfolio management. She is also well-versed on many other new product development topics and is an active blogger, public speaker, and guest lecturer. In this interview, you will learn… * What portfolio management is, * the goals of portfolio management, * constructing and managing portfolios, and * common mistakes you can avoid. Practices and Ideas for Product Managers and Innovators Summary of questions discussed: * What is product portfolio management? It is  the discipline and framework for applying the two most precious organizational resources—your people and your money—to get the greatest value out of your investment. If you think about portfolio management like you do with your 401K, it’s the same concept, but you’re applying it to innovation. It’s about making tradeoff decisions and balance decisions to achieve your corporate or innovation strategies. * What are the goals of portfolio management? The primary goal is value maximization. Dr. Cooper and Dr. Edgett of Stage-Gate fame use that phrase — value maximization.  We have don’t a ton of research and the biggest pain point is too much work for resources (people). That’s actually a portfolio management problem. You could be looking at one single project or product myopically and saying it is a good idea without the context of a larger or broader portfolio. So you’re missing that perspective of how that one idea fits in the greater good – the portfolio of projects. Some things to consider – do we already have multiple products in that space, will it cannibalize something else, are we hitting one market too hard and having a gap in another one? Many of these questions deal with the need to have balance in a portfolio, for example, reasonable percentages of resources on breakthrough projects vs customer satisfaction projects. * What are the ways to construct a portfolio? This is one of those questions where it depends. There’s no one right answer and it really does vary pretty widely. Automotive or pharma, which have really long cycle times, versus a CPG company that has extremely short cycle times, will have portfolios constructed differently. In most cases, the portfolio is a mix of things. And, you can have multiple portfolios with a project showing up in different ways so that different people in the organization can see it the way that they want and how they think about it. There are top-down portfolios with goals set by senior leadership. As an example, a goal may be to deliver existing products to a new market- to enter the new market and grow revenue by X percent. It’s a conscious decision at the executive level. On the flipside is the bottom-up approach. That might be a situation where product features are driving a particular product, and customer requests are driving features. There are also dozens of other portfolio types. You might have a portfolio by region, by brand, by product line, etc. * How are portfolios managed and controlled? It depends again on the business and the frequency, but a trend is establishing some kind of a project and portfolio management office. They call them Centers of Excellence. Having a place for the discipline, for the people, process,

TEI 084: Product portfolio management – with Carrie Nauyalis

Trends can be a product manager's best friend. They can propel products, increasing adoption by customers, or if misread, they may have costly consequences of wasted resources, too much inventory, and lost opportunities. Product managers know about the importance of trends, but are often already overwhelmed and don’t make time to study trends. Are there ways to make trend identification easier? To find out and learn about identifying and using trends, I contacted Max Luthy. He is the Director of Trends & Insights at TrendWatching, a company that scans the globe identifying emerging consumer trends and changes in trends. He is also the co-author of the book Trend-Driven Innovation. In the interview, you will learn the steps to apply trend-driven innovation... Scan, Focus, Generate, Execute, and Culture.

TEI 083: Trend-driven innovation for product managers – with Max Luthy

Listen to the Interview Product management is about change – the change that creating new products involves. Along the way, product managers need to learn about customers and their needs, consider problems from different perspectives, and collaborate with others. A person with deep experience in doing these things and helping groups and organizations identify and push through barriers of innovation is Chuck Appleby. He is a leadership and organization development consultant with over 30 years of management, consulting, and coaching experience in government, industry, and non-profits. In the interview we discuss two valuable tools for product managers and organizations wishing to solve problems for themselves and customers: * Action Learning, and * Design Thinking.   Practices and Ideas for Product Managers and Innovators Summary of questions discussed: * Tell us about the work you were doing that created the need to study Design Thinking. For years and years I had been helping companies solve tough problems using Action Learning. This is a method developed at the Cavendish Physics Lab in Cambridge University by professor Reg Revans, who had gotten very concerned that the world was changing so fast that we would never achieve the kind of speed of innovation that was needed to keep up with change. Action Learning helps people think about problems from new perspectives that lead to better solutions. However, Action Learning is a bit analytical and didn’t have that creative spark that I was looking for. This led me to Design Thinking. Today I use a framework that leverages Action Learning and Design Thinking that is simply Discover, Design, Deploy, and Sustain.   * What are the steps to applying Action Learning? There are  five steps, which are generally completed in one group session that is two to three hours long. The steps are: * First: The problem-owner describes the challenge or problem in 3-5 minutes. * Second: This is the framing step and is the most challenging of all the steps. The objective is to get people focused on the desired future state. Consider what is going on in today’s reality, what the external forces are, what underlying assumptions are being made, and what is the core challenge to address. * Third: Next is solutioning, which is a problem-solving step. With the problem now clearly understood, solutioning usually comes naturally. * Fourth: Then we commit to action based on the solution chosen. * Fifth: The final step is reflection on the entire process and assessing how the group did and what could be done better next time.   * What is an example of applying Design Thinking? A recent example was with the Department of Human Services in Arlington and the Arlington County Public Library, specifically.  The central challenge, which is seen in all businesses, was not engaging with certain groups of customers. In the case of the library, they were not seeing teenagers, 30-somethings, or recent immigrants using the library. To consider the situation, we created three teams to interview those three cohorts (see link to video below that explores this). The groups didn’t ask about the library. In fact, the questions they developed had nothing to do with the library, except it focused on the library’s mission, which is a love of reading, access to information, and building community. So those were the questions that were asked. The insight that came out was, “We like to meet new people doing fun things.” So the library came up with a couple of great ideas, one of which, designed to reach 30-somethings,  was an annual ball to raise money for literacy. 30-somethings piled in and began to make a connection with the library.   * What do you need to have to make Design Thinking successful?

TEI 082: Design Thinking and Action Learning for product managers – with Chuck Appleby, PhD

Listen to the Interview How can product managers help their organizations become more innovative? That is the topic of this discussion with the author of Innovation Wars: Driving Successful Corporate Innovation Programs. The author is Scott Bale, a technology & innovation evangelist. Scott has been a serial entrepreneur, speaker at TEDx, and now runs Innovation Labs Asia, based in Singapore. In the interview, Scott shares a model for helping organizations be more innovative that consists of 4 C’s: * Context * Culture development * Capability, and * Collaboration   Practices and Ideas for Product Managers and Innovators Summary of questions discussed: * Your book Innovation Wars is a guide book for product managers to help their organizations become more innovative. It addresses several tools for taking the guess work out of creating and launching successful products. Let’s start by talking about how you get your customers to innovate for you. Can you tell us about that? Innovation is a very creative process. The reason to co-create with customers is to ensure you are building products that customers need and want. There are many examples of companies that have done this but that are not well-known for it, including Apple, Tesla, and Facebook. Also, look at the related problems or jobs customers need to solve. For example, when someone gets a mortgage, they likely will be moving and moving is painful. A bank that provided a mortgage that also helped you move would create a competitive advantage. * How can we start with co-creating? I use a framework inspired from the world of Design Thinking that I call the 4 C model: Context, Culture development, Capability, and Collaboration. Co-creating is part of Capability. Start with what facts you know about your customer. Then identify their aspirations and goals – the job they need done. Knowing that, identify the obstacle or challenge in achieving the goal. Uncover what they have already tried to solve the problem and what their existing behaviors are. These are the early adopters who want to solve the problem but have not found a satisfactory solution yet and represents a persona to find early adopters. * Can you take us through rest of the 4 C model? The first C is context – how do you structure yourself and create an environment for innovation. Next is Culture development, which is developing a culture of curiosity, experimentation, and the role of failure. Capability is the third C. This involves quantifying the value of an idea and the elements we discussed previously. Lean Startup practices can be used here. The final C is Collaboration – look for partners and others in the supply chain of a product to add value. * What else do we need to know? We need to apply Assumption Exploration. This is where hypotheses are created and tested to better understand the customer problem. You need to examine what you are assuming about the customer problem and solution. Focus first on the assumptions with the deepest impact and risk and design an experiment to test these assumptions. Steve Blank’s work to test hypotheses is the basis of this exploration. Interviews with people representing the persona you created can be used to test hypotheses. If an assumption is wrong, refocus the persona or the problem to solve and test again. When conducting the assumption tests, look for patterns that invalidate or validate an assumption.   Useful links: * Innovation Wars, Scott’s newest book * Scott’s website * Scott’s LinkedIn Profile   Innovation Quote

TEI 081: Innovation Wars & creating products customers want – with Scott Bales

When established companies decide they need to be more innovative, they often talk in terms of acting more like a startup. But acting like a startup is much more challenging in reality, especially for larger organizations. Instead, established companies can partner with startups. Doing so is the topic of the book, Collective Disruption: How Corporations and Startups Can Co-Create Transformative New Businesses.  This interview is with the author of the book, Michael Docherty. He is a leading innovation expert and entrepreneur with a variety of broad-based experiences from senior-level corporate roles, start-ups, consulting and venture capital. I expect you’ll find value in the discussion if you have interests in innovation from either the startup perspective or the larger organization perspective. In this interview you will learn what Collective Disruption is and the 4-stage framework for applying it: * Discover, * Define, * Incubate, and * Integrate.   Practices and Ideas for Product Managers and Innovators Summary of questions discussed: * Your book, Collective Disruption, is about transformative innovation. Let’s start with a definition of transformative innovation. Innovation is bringing new value to market. Let’s call core innovation all those things you need to do to keep your current business healthy and growing at least at a moderate rate. Transformative innovation involves disruptive opportunities, those things that are new business models and whole new sources of growth.   * How can startups help larger companies with transformative innovation? You first have to start with the question why do the large companies need help.  Consumers and customers expect more, there’s more competition and options, and product lifecycles are shrinking every year. One statistic talks about 75% of the current S&P 500 being off that list within the next 7 years. What we used to call permanent isn’t permanent anymore, and that’s why the old approach to innovation doesn’t work anymore – core innovation is not enough. Companies need to make transformative innovation a bigger part of their growth strategy. Here’s where startups come in. What makes established companies great are all of the systems and engines of growth they have around optimizing their brands and distribution and business models. But when it comes to starting something new, all of those things that help you optimize a big company, are the exact same things that get in your way in building new business models. That’s really why companies are looking to startups as a way to fuel growth.   * What are the benefits to the startup that gets involved with a larger company? First is to have a built-in exit partner. Next is to have a partner that can help you reverse engineer your startup in a way that in the end gives you a better result [examples are in the interview]. Another is that, especially for early-stage startups, the VC market is a very different than it was 10 years ago. Strategic investments from corporates can be a great alternative to that.   * You call this ability for startups to help larger companies with innovation “collective disruption”. You define a 4 stage framework for applying collective disruption. How does this work? It starts with Discover. The Discover phase is really around leveraging startups and the innovation ecosystem generally, as a way to fuel your strategy.  Companies should be  saying, “Let’s look at, based on the areas where we want to play, who are the key players in those spaces, and what relationships can we build in order to bring new competencies to the table?” So you start to think about developing an innovation strategy that isn’t just about what you can do well, but also about what other companies that you have relationships with or...

TEI 080: Innovate like a startup – with Michael Docherty

I read Crossing the Chasm when it was published in 1991. The third edition was released last year, with updated examples of how companies successfully increased the market for their new products. The book introduced me to the “target market model,” which had a significant impact on how I thought about the relationship between product growth and market segments. To explore this model, I asked Michael Eckhardt to tell us about it and what it means to cross the chasm. He is a Managing Director & Senior Workshop Leader at Chasm Institute, a consultancy to tech companies.  He joined Chasm after careers at Price Waterhouse, Harbridge Consulting, HP and PepsiCo, and has since worked with over 90 tech-based businesses, spanning 500+ client engagements, over the past 15 years. In this interview you will learn: * the Chasm Institute market development model, *  how to determine the specific stage of the product category your new product is competing in, and * what is required to successfully move from one stage to the next in the target market model.   Practices and Ideas for Product Managers and Innovators Summary of questions discussed: * What is the relationship between the Crossing the Chasm book by Geoffrey Moore and the Chasm Institute? Both have existed for more than 15 years. Moore is chairman of the Chasm Institute and I am the managing director. The latest edition of the Chasm book has 25 all new examples of recognizable companies that have crossed the chasm – taking technology and disruptive products to market and getting them into mainstream markets. The Chasm Institute helps high-tech teams learn, apply, and implement best practices in market development strategy. * How does the Product Life Cycle model differ from Target Market model? The diagrams below are helpful to compare the models. Product Life Cycle (PLC) Model The PLC is in place in most companies. It is used by product managers and others in organizations to make decisions about launching a product, managing it, and obsoleting it.   Target Market Model The Target Market model is about the product category stage the product is in and how mature that category is.  The stages of the model convey how customers’ buying behavior changes depending on product category maturity. The stages are (the interview includes product examples for the stages): * Early market – when the product category is new. 80% of the total customers’ requirements need to be fulfilled in the product. This is where a minimum viable product (MVP) is used to understand the needs of the customers. * Chasm – to cross the chasm, the 80% whole product from the Early Market must now develop into a 100% whole product. Not a perfect product, but 100% of what the pragmatist customer in the Bowling Alley needs to satisfy their compelling reason to buy (CRTB). This 100% whole product can be best thought of as: “Everything the pragmatist customer needs – and nothing they don’t need – to get their compelling reason to buy fulfilled, so they can confidently buy and use.” * Bowling Alley – the first pin or niche that the product can be a whole product for, then identifying adjacent niches that would also buy the product, knocking down niches (market segments) to create rapid growth. * Tornado – this is the stage of hyper growth that is characterized by not only offering a whole product but a friction-free product. This is one that is easy to buy, understand, and use.

TEI 079: Cross the chasm using the target market model – with Chasm Institute’s Michael Eckhardt