The Everyday Innovator Podcast for Product Managers

This discussion is about Voice of the Customer (VOC). When it comes to VOC experts, there are only a handful of people that match the experience of my guest today, helping hundreds of companies with VOC research and training many more practitioners. His name is Gerry Katz. He is also the author of several published papers on the topic, a contributor to professional books, guest lecturer at MIT, Harvard, and other top schools.   During the interview, you’ll hear us discuss: * what VOC is and is not, * the 4-step approach for using VOC, and * tips for conducting VOC interviews.   Practices and Ideas for Product Managers and Innovators Summary of questions discussed: * What is VOC? In a nutshell, it is the process of gathering and understanding customer needs. While that sounds ridiculously simplistic, it actually isn’t. There are so many pitfalls, or so many rookie mistakes that people make in trying to understand customer needs, that an entire science has grown up around this area. * What is not VOC but is often mistaken for it? To start with, it’s not asking what customers want. If you ask Mr. or Mrs. Customer, tell me what you want, tell me what you need, the customer thinks they’re supposed to go into solution mode and start describing the exact features and the exact solutions they want. Now, unfortunately most customers aren’t all that creative, and so all they do is play back features and solutions that already exist in the marketplace. If you take that as your guidance, almost by definition, you will never do better than a me-too product. Instead, a much better approach is to ask about customer’s experiences. Another misunderstanding is thinking of VOC as any kind of market research. VOC is actually a subset of the entire field of market research. VOC also is treated as a means of measuring customer satisfaction, but that is not its purpose. Other tools, such as the Net Promoter Score, measure satisfaction. * What are the roots of VOC?  John Houser published a famous paper called The House of Quality, which was the first important English language description of a Japanese product development technique called QFD, or Quality Function Deployment. In order to do QFD, you have to start off with a detailed list of customer needs. Abby Griffin, a dissertation student of John’s, decided a good doctoral dissertation would be to study how companies understand customer needs in support of new product development and innovation. Her dissertation won the thesis prize at MIT and her and John turned it into the journal paper that essentially coined the term and created the field. The paper was published in 1993 in the journal titled Marketing Science. In the paper, they offered a four-part definition of Voice of the Customer. I won’t go into great detail, because we only have a half hour, but the parts are a (1) detailed list of customer wants and needs, (2) expressed in the customers’ own words, (3) organized into a hierarchy, and (4) prioritized by the customer. * How can a product manager conduct VOC research? It starts off with a series of one-on-one interviews. We conduct face-to-face interviews, and in some cases they have to be done by telephone. You will create 2-3 times as many needs if you record the interviews, transcribe them, and then analyze from a transcript, as opposed to the more usual process of note-taking, even if a colleague records needs while you interview. After conducting 30-40 interviews and transcribing them, it’s time to pull out the needs – perhaps around 100 unique needs — from the transcriptions and enter them into a database. Then create an affinity diagram of the needs by associating related needs into groupings called buckets. Abby’s research showed that customers are likely to affinitize differently from the way researchers...

TEI 070: Innovation and product management at Chick-fil-A – with Steve Nedvidek

I visited a few dozen Chick-fil-A restaurants across several states while I was on a year-long RV trip interviewing innovators. It was one of several restaurants I frequented. I was surprised and delighted with the consistently pleasant customer experience. That level of consistency is difficult for any chain of restaurants to achieve. It is one of many areas where Chick-fil-A applies innovation – customer experience in this case. To find out more about how Chick-fil-A innovates, I arranged an interview with Steve Nedvidek. He is a senior manager in Innovation for Chick-fil-A,  responsible for helping to build the innovation muscle within the organization. His primary duties are geared toward creating a culture of and competency for innovation at Chick-fil-A. At the end of the interview Steve shared that Chick-fil-A is a case study in Nancy Duarte’s new book, Illuminate, which shares the steps for effectively communicating your ideas and getting others to support them. Nancy will be a guest in a future interview. In this interview we discuss: * The relationship between improv acting and innovation * Three questions to increase organizational innovation * How “Hatch” – the Chick-fil-A innovation lab – is used * Design Thinking influences at Chick-fil-A   Practices and Ideas for Product Managers and Innovators Summary of questions discussed: * Many people are interested in what it takes to be an innovation leader. What was your path to becoming responsible for building the innovation muscles at Chick-fil-A?  I started as an associate producer in the training video area, utilizing some of my background in theater and communications. I then moved to marketing for about 16 years in a variety of roles. In 2010 I started to focus on innovation as a discipline for Chick-fil-A and became part of a group that was committed to building the innovation muscle at Chick-fil-A. I’ve been a part of the innovation dialogue since then. My primary job right now is helping us learn how to coach, train, and socialize innovation in the organization so that we stimulate progress as well as preserve the core of the business. * How did your work in theater and improv influence your work and innovation? I have my master’s in theater and I always wanted to use my creativity either in an advertising agency or somehow in the arts world. When I joined Chick-fil-A, I didn’t know how I was going to make that work. But I have parlayed my theater experience into a very nice career of spreading creativity in every role that I have had at Chick-fil-A by just asking the questions of “what if” versus “what is.” That is a very powerful question for innovators – “what if.” * What actions have you taken to increase innovation at Chick-fil-A? We first had to understand the current state of innovation in the organization – how people thought about innovation. We surveyed employees and asked three very important questions: * What is innovation?  We learned there was no common definition or process in place. * Do we have a culture of innovation? Instead of a culture of innovation we had a culture of continuous improvement. * Why or why not? We had a culture that feared failure and was unsure what would happen if an employee failed. We created classes, that we still teach monthly, about the meaning of innovation to us and our processes for innovation. We went to d.school and learned about Design Thinking. We also created Hatch, a dedicated innovation environment. * Tell us about Hatch. We opened Hatch, an 80,000 square feet facility, on 12-12-2012 to be a place where we can try out new ideas, create prototypes, bring in customers for feedback, and safely innovate without the fear of failure. It is the place where we try new things, fail,

TEI 069: 4 reasons you should expand to an educational market- with Product Manager Bill Cullen

If you want your own BB-8 droid, you can buy one from Sphero, a company in Boulder, CO. BB-8 is the adorable droid in Star Wars, The Force Awakens. It is a round ball that rolls across the ground with a head that always stays on top of the ball. Sphero fuses robotic and digital technology into an immersive entertainment experience. They make other droids besides BB-8. The original product is named after the company – Sphero. It is basically a white sphere a little lager than a pool cue ball that you control with your smartphone to roll around the room and play games with. I bought one after seeing it in a Discovery store. In 2014 the company did something really smart – they started creating education curriculum that teaches kids how to code using a Sphero device. What started as a meetup for kids to learn about robtoics and coding is now an expanding library of free lessons for teachers and students. And, in the process of learning how to code, the lessons also teach about music, engineering, math, science, art, writing, and more. They have found a way to bring learning and playing together. This educational program is called SPRK (spark). The product manager for SPRK is Bill Cullen and I had the pleasure of talking with him about the SPRK program. In this interview, you will hear the benefits of incorporating an education market into your product plans, including… * expanding the overall market, * creating passionate customers, * increasing speed of innovation through community involvement, and * adding community-generated products.   Practices and Ideas for Product Managers and Innovators Summary of questions discussed: * Tell us about the SPRK program – how it got started and what its purpose is? SPRK stands for schools, parents, robots, kids. SPRK started as a meet-up for kids called Sphero Rangers. We noticed that as more kids participated, one of the things they always wanted to do was program the robot. Over time, as the product came to market, everyone spent extra time having meetups with interested kids or educators to program the robots. It developed over time to more people being interested and we created some really rudimentary mobile apps to program the robots. That was the beginning of the SPRK program. I added a community and a platform that we’re calling the Lightning Lab that we launched recently. It’s a place for people to share what they’ve programmed for the robot and projects that they’ve done. Educators can create and find structured content to bring into the classroom. * What are your responsibilities as the product manager for SPRK? I’m involved on both hardware and software aspects of our product lines. On the hardware side, I manage our current product in both the retail and educational channels and contribute to the design of the next version. We have a team of hardware and electrical engineers that I work with directly to do prototyping and refine the industrial design to get the product completed. On the software side there’s a huge amount of innovation in the last year and this coming year, too, because of the community we’ve built. On the software side we are building the tools to make programming for Sphero in a way that people are inspired to share what they have done and put it all in the same place so that it’s easily accessible for anyone. We’re on that journey right now with Lightning Lab. If you have a robot and you’re just a retail customer, and you bought it to go play with, you can have that experience, but you can also download the Lightning Lab app. And here’s the Easter Egg – the app lets you program any of our products, not just the Sphero SPRK edition. * Product managers are innovators and business people. From a business perspective, how has SPRK – entering the education market – impacted the overall comp...

Product managers must be effective communicators. We have ideas and product concepts to share, but the best idea will fall flat if not properly explained in terms our audience understands and appreciates. Further, if the idea is complicated, we have to find ways to make it easy to understand.   This is the world that my guest, Lee LeFever operates in. He is the author of The Art of Explanation – Making Your Ideas, Products and Services Easier to Understand.   In this interview, Lee shares the 3-step approach to explaining any product idea – the 3Ps of… * planning, * packaging, and * presenting.   Lee has also made a free eCourse available for learning how to share your ideas in ways that audiences fall in love with them. The free eCourse is called Explainer’s Secret Weapon.   Practices and Ideas for Product Managers and Innovators Summary of questions discussed: * Product managers always need to explain ideas clearly, but there are two times that are most challenging and most important – explaining a new product concept to stakeholders, especially those who fund projects, and explaining a new product to customers. Is your framework applicable to both situations? Absolutely because they both require you to think really hard about your audience and empathize with them. That’s what I mean by thinking hard about your audience – empathy is something that has to be part of your process because explanations live or die based on how they’re perceived by your audience. Put yourself in their shoes and think, how is this going to sound to them. The problem is, when we’re busy, when we’re under pressure, when we have deadlines, that sometimes falls by the wayside and we revert back to the language that worked for us in other settings. I think you’ve really got to get out of your head and into somebody else’s head to make communication effective. * Let’s discuss the three components of your framework – the 3 P’s: Plan, Package, Present. What steps do product managers take to plan for such a communication? Planning is thinking about a situation and asking questions about what you are communicating. Sure, you’ll consider if the information is factually correct, that it is the right information to communicate, this it is branded correctly, etc. But there’s a question that is THE question… is this understandable? Are you using familiar language that people are going to actually be able to understand? That’s the real message of the plan part of developing explanation is making understanding a priority and being very intentional about that. To plan correctly, consider these three guidelines: * Anticipate needs of the audience * Focus on the purpose you wish to achieve * Ask if your message is understandable to the audience * What is involved in the second P, Package? Packaging is the process of looking at the facts and the information you want to communicate and then figuring out a way or thinking through how to put that information into a world the audience will understand. An example that I use for this is superstitions and fables. Fables are a great example. Sometimes I say, “do you really think it’s bad luck to walk under a ladder, or is it really just not a good idea?” I think it’s really just not a good idea, but it doesn’t work just to tell someone they shouldn’t walk under a ladder. You have to repackage it and turn it into something that’s actually useful for them. I think there’s a lot of ways to repackage ideas, but the things that are most effective is to look at the facts you’re trying to communicate and ask what’s the context? Is there a story that you can tell or an anecdote that you can use to explain these f...

TEI 068: Making product concepts easy to understand- with Lee LeFever

In this interview you are going to learn simple structures for answering product management interview questions. This is useful for anyone wanting to start a career in product management or making a move to another company as well as for product leaders who interview candidates. My guest, Charles Du (Do), is a UX Designer, SCRUM practitioner, and award-winning product manager and coach. He led the design of NASA’s first iPhone app, which received NASA’s software of the year award. Charles teaches product management in many venues and I tracked him down after I saw a course he recently launched on Udemy titled “Master the Product Manager Interview.” In this interview, you’ll learn: * what your first response should be to any scenario question, * how to respond to any general question, * three steps for the perfect answer to estimation questions, and * five steps for the perfect answer to product vision questions. Practices and Ideas for Product Managers and Innovators Summary of questions discussed: * You have taught product management classes in the past and have now created training for doing well in interviews for a product management job. How did this new training come about? In addition to teaching online, I also teach in-person product management workshops. I found that students often asked about getting product management jobs. Questions like how they can ace an interview and what are common questions? I realized that there are many different types of questions that interviewers ask and that I could teach how to answer the questions in a really easy to consume course. * Who is the training for? It is valuable for anyone pursuing product management positions. The examples I use are from the software industry, but the structured responses I teach apply to product management, not to specific industries. * We don’t have time to go through all types of questions that may be asked in an interview – which one should product managers who are interviewing master first?  That is the MIQ – the Most Important Question. It is actually a question the candidate will ask during the interview. At the beginning of every interview, you’ll be asked some type of question like, tell me about your background, or walk me through your experience. This is where you fit in the MIQ. Reply with,  “I’d be happy to share my background, but before I start, can I ask, what are the top 3 qualities you look for in ideal candidates?” The MIQ is basically a question that the candidate asks, to flush out all the things that the interviewer cares about. The reason that this is really important is because the earlier you ask this question, the more contextual you can make all your answers during the rest of the interview. * What are the 3 qualities that employers typically look for? I have not found a lot of variety in how the interviewer responds to the MIQ question. They usually are looking for someone with product vision, execution ability, and leadership skills – these are the 3 big buckets. Knowing this, you can prepare examples from your past experiences that fit into each one of these buckets. * What is an estimation question and how do you structure a response to one? An example is, “how many golf balls can you fit into a bathroom?” The interviewer wants to see your thought process – they are not looking for a right answer to the question but are examining your analysis skills. The perfect response is structured in 3 steps: * Clarify the question. Ask details, such as what is in the bathroom, is it in a one-bedroom apartment or luxury house, etc. * Provide a rough estimate that is structured with variables and an equation. The variables would be the volume of the bathroom, the volume of everything in the bathroom,

TEI 067: Master the product manager interview – with interviewing coach Charles Du

Need a better customer research approach? This is the interview to listen to. My guest has an impressive background in product management, having served in product manager roles at Apple, Intuit, and other companies before co-founding a company that solves an important problem for product managers—getting the voice of the customer in a timely and money-saving manner. The company is Digsite and its co-founder and CMO is Jane Boutelle. In this interview Jane shares some of the problems product managers encounter when conducting and then sharing customer research data as well as how to improve these processes. In this interview, you’ll learn: * how customer research is often piecemeal * the need to have a 360 understanding of customers, and * ways to create an online customer community as an advisory board.   Practices and Ideas for Product Managers and Innovators Summary of questions discussed: * Since you co-founded a company dealing with the voice of the customer, let’s start with your experiences with market research and uncovering the voice of the customer. I was the first product manager at Intuit for Quickbooks. We used ethnography to better understand our customers in their own homes.  It was called “follow-me-home” and I learned a lot in the process. However, in many organizations the consumer research work comes in little bits and pieces that doesn’t provide a cohesive picture and takes too long. Often what the last customer says is what is most heard. Also, many people in organizations don’t have the opportunity to get as close to customers as they want to.  A window to accurately view the customer is needed. * Your company, Digsite, must address some of these customer research issues – what problem was Digsite created to solve? It’s all about understanding customers, differences in market segments, their actual needs, how they are responding to your offerings and those of competitors… what really makes customers tick.  We developed a custom system for creating online communities for consumer research that empowers companies to really know their customers. * What are product managers at a medium to large-size companies likely missing in their approach to customer research? We are seeing a few things. Companies doing good ethnographic research find that it tends to be expensive and time consuming. Usability testing is frequently encountered and companies are using good online platforms for that, but in the process, they are missing a 360 degree view of customer – what really makes them tick. They need to move beyond usability testing to really understand consumers. * What does customer research look like using Digsite? We create a community of customers for the product team and organization to learn from. We recruit customers for the community based on the product team’s objectives. It is essentially a little advisory team that the product team has access to throughout the product development project. Communities are typically 20-25 representative customers but can be up to 100 people. We conduct Digsite Sprints where a company can get critical feedback and insights in just a week. * Product managers are always learning and I expect you have learned a lot as Digsite has grown – what is an insight about customer research you have discovered while at Digsite? We really need to make sure that we’re thinking about research, not as an end, but as a real means to understand. It is important not to let the research process get in the way of  what you’re trying to accomplish. The thing that I’ve seen at Digsite is that we can give an organization a research capability that aligns with their business needs and answers the questions they need to ask about their customers.   Useful links:

TEI 066: Conducting customer research – with co-founder Jane Boutelle

Just about every CEO talks about innovation but making it happen in their organizations is not easy. My guest agrees – stating that innovation is not easy, but it is simple. And, to show us how simple innovation can be, he just released the book, “Keep Innovation Simple: Lead with Clarity and Focus in a World of Constant Change.” He is a speaker, writer, consultant, trainer, and coach for innovation and product management leaders. His new book is available on Amazon and the eBook version contains frequent links to videos, websites, research reports, and more. You can review portions of the book at no cost on his website at www.3point14innovation.com. In the following interview you will learn the 3 C’s to keep innovation simple: * Creation, * Conversion, and * Control.   Practices and Ideas for Product Managers and Innovators Summary of questions discussed: * Why did you write this book – Keep Innovation Simple? There were three reasons that really drove me to write it. From my experience with the Product Development and Management Association (PDMA), I knew a lot of great thought leaders, great academics doing wonderful research, and it seemed to be hard to get the results of their research into the hands of innovators and companies. The second reason is when organizations try to do innovation projects they often over-complicate things. Lastly, I read a lot of business books and the vast majority of them take themselves way too seriously. I wanted to write a book that readers could have a little fun with. * How do you define innovation? I define innovation as the intersection of three overlapping areas – novelty, value, and execution. All three are needed for innovation to occur. Novelty means you’re offering something new. Value means it provides benefit to its users. Execution means it is created in a manner that mutually benefits both its users and its developers. * In the book you make a distinction between innovation best practices and evidence-based practices – tell us about the difference. The challenge that I found while developing the book was that there really is no such thing as a best practice. Because innovative organizations are always improving how they innovate, if something is a best practice today, it may be a second or third best practice tomorrow. Also, what works at my organization may not be what works at your organization. So it’s best practice for me, but not necessarily best practice for you. Finally, there’s a whole lot of things that people think they know but that really aren’t true. So I changed my approach from calling it a best practice to evidenced-based practices. What I’ve tried to deliver are the results of objective, peer-reviewed, rigorous research that has gone into what separates the people who really do well with innovation and those who don’t. * You address innovation in terms of 3 C’s – creation, conversion, and control. What do you mean by control? Together, I called the three C’s the innovation engine. The first C is control and it consists of four parts. You start with a mission, move on to culture, then to strategy, and then portfolio management. You have to do them in that order because they build on each other. Mission is really why your organization exists and what you’re trying to achieve. Culture is the operating system of how your organization functions. Strategy is the how of achieving the why in the mission. We know what we want to do, this is how we’re going to go about doing it. Portfolio management are the projects we’re actually going to be working on and how we’re going to apply resources to those projects. * Tell us about the next C, creation. Creation has three pieces.

TEI 065: Keeping innovation simple – with Brad Barbera

Product managers and innovators are using Lean Startup practices to create products customers love. But, many product managers are still learning about the right ways to apply Lean Startup to their work. To find some answers, I interviewed Tristan Kromer. His bio shares that he “helps product teams go fast.” He does this by coaching teams in Lean Startup principles, breaking down big problems into small steps and running experiments to improve product and business models. He’s done this for large enterprises as well as startups and companies in between. With his remaining hours, Tristan volunteers his time with Lean Startup Circle and blogs at GrasshopperHerder.com. In this discussion, you will learn about: * prioritizing product features, * tools to validate product concepts, and * what customers value.   Practices and Ideas for Product Managers and Innovators Summary of questions discussed: * A few milestones in your past include a philosophy undergrad, being a bandleader and music producer, Marketing VP, and a startup co-founder. What is the thread through your experiences that led to Lean coaching? Except for philosophy, they all have creativity in common. The music industry is shockingly similar to the tech industry. It’s basically a bunch of people running around claiming to be rock stars of one form or another and trying to become famous while desperately looking for money . You have the same types of personalities and the same product development problems. They both want to bridge the gap between your delusions about what the world wants, your reality distortion field, your inward facing reality distortion field, and what people actually want and desire. So it’s a question of bridging that gap. * Why is there so much interest in Lean principles from startups and organizations of all sizes? One reason is because it’s the latest buzzword and bestselling book by the same name. Eric Ries is absolutely brilliant and does amazing things that appear magical but are not.  We have successful disruptive companies, such as Dropbox, who have used it, adding to the interest. * If we have a concept for a product but have done nothing else yet, what is the first thing we should do? I want to reframe the question. The job of a startup is to find a repeatable business model. A startup is any sort of organization that exists in a highly uncertain and risky environment or situation. Because of that, a startup has to essentially identify risks and eliminate them as quickly as possible. Knowing if customers will buy the product or not is a key risk area that is often considered.  Several tools can be used to determine if customers will commit to buying the product (a few are discussed by name). But that is only one area of risk. Once that is addressed, there may be technical risk, distribution risk, product use risk, etc. Clearly addressing risk leads to a repeatable business model. * What is an example of addressing risk? Let’s talk about evaluative experiments. If you have a clear hypothesis about who your customer is and what they want, you can run an experiment that will give you a relatively clear answer. For example, say my target segment is skateboarders who are 20 years old and had a broken arm within the past three weeks. My product concept is a magical cast that heals their broken arm in half the time of traditional casts. My hypothesis is that if I show them a specific landing page, they will purchase the product – a simple if-this-then-that hypothesis. I set a fail condition for the hypothesis to be 20% – if less than 20% commit to purchasing, the hypothesis fails.  I show that landing page to one hundred skateboarders. If less than 20% sign up, clearly this product is a bad idea or it’s unbelievable.

TEI 064: Help your product team go fast using Lean Startup practices – with Tristan Kromer