The Everyday Innovator Podcast for Product Managers

Product management work changes from company to company and from one industry to the next. A key factor influencing the work is the size of the organization. Product managers at a large company like Microsoft will have a different scope of responsibilities than a product manager in a small startup.  To explore these differences and other aspects of product management, I interviewed Ellen Chisa, a product manager who has worked for companies of different scales. We got connected with each other because we were both listed among the top-40 product management influencers by Product Management Year in Review. Her educational background is in engineering and she has started her MBA at the Harvard Business School. She was a program manager at Microsoft (which is a “product manager” at other companies) and also a product manager for Kickstarter. She is currently the VP of Product at a startup, Lola Travel, in Boston. In the past she taught product management courses and workshops, including the product management bootcamp at General Assembly. In this interview, you will learn: * Differences working as a product manager in large and small companies. * What is rewarding about the work in organizations of very different sizes. * The challenges product managers can expect based on size of the company. During the discussion with Ellen I made an error attributing the quote, “If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late,” to the wrong person. Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn Founder, made this important statement. My apologies to Reid!   Practices and Ideas for Product Managers and Innovators Summary of questions discussed: What was most rewarding in your work as product (program) manager at Microsoft? At Microsoft the role is aligned with marketing and involves getting into the technical details for what should be developed. Their product managers must have very good technical skills. The most rewarding aspect of working in a large organization with a large customer base is the number of people your work impacts. You may be making a small change to a product but that change impacts a very large number of users, making their day better. Also, you get a lot of practice with the fundamentals of product management because you have time to go through the process the way it is supposed to be done, considering the problem more deeply, who are the stakeholders, who do I need to coordinate with, etc. What are some challenges product managers face in large enterprises? I never could tell the impact I was making in the organization versus other product managers. The scope of control is limited. The requirements are pretty specific by the time they get to a product manager. Also, I would see some stakeholders infrequently compared to a start-up environment. For example, I would have a legal review once a year and not coordinate with the legal team outside of that review. Now for the other side of the spectrum – what is your role at the startup and what do you like? The startup is Lola Travel. I started as an intern as part of my Harvard Business School MBA program. My technical and business background was what they needed. The role is so much fun because you have large impacts on the product. We rapidly iterate product versions, getting customer feedback between each one. This creates a near-continuous feedback loop which I find rewarding. I see how my work is directly making a difference in the product and to  customers. What are the challenges working in the startup?  I tend to be a perfectionist and have to decide what are the most important aspects of a product to address and which ones must wait. It is also a balance between deciding when some part of the product is “good enough” and when another one must be excellent. We try to keep the focus on the user when making these decisions and judging what wi...

TEI 063: Product management in large and small companies – with Ellen Chisa

One of the frequent topics I am asked about is processes for new product development. Sometimes the topic is approached from the perspective of an innovation framework, which includes how ideas are discovered for product concepts, or it is focused on developing a concept into a product. Both are addressed by the Stage-Gate system. Stage-Gate International, founded by Dr. Scott Edgett and Dr. Robert Cooper, created the Stage-Gate system after researching what successful product teams did that unsuccessful products teams did not do. To explore Stage-Gate, I interviewed Mitch Kemp. He is the Managing Director of Stage-Gate International for their business in the United States. Mitch is a Stage-Gate practitioner and coach, specializing in enterprise transformation, strategy, and high value results. He has a broad industry background that includes industrial manufacturing, high tech, financial services and government, working with well-recognized companies across the globe. In this interview, you will learn: * who uses Stage-Gate and why * framework basics, and * adding agility to Stage-Gate.   Practices and Ideas for Product Managers, Developers, and Innovators Summary of questions discussed:   * How did Stage-Gate come into existence?  Stage-Gate has a 30 year history. It started with Dr. Bob Cooper and Dr. Scott Edgett’s  fundamental research on what makes companies better innovators. The results of that research was a set of best practices that  evolved into what we know commonly as Stage-Gate. But really, there are four key drivers that we found to drive innovation results. One is of course the Stage-Gate process. The other drivers are innovation strategy, portfolio management, and innovation culture. Together, those four drivers create our Innovation Performance Framework with Stage-Gate as the foundation. A philosophy is embedded in this framework, which is to do the right projects and to do those projects right. * Who uses stage-gate and why?  80% of the Fortune 1000 uses Stage-Gate-like process. Sometimes they call it Stage-Gate or they use other terms. It is used in businesses of all sizes, but by the time revenue exceeds $100 million dollars, the organization really needs a Stage-Gate system. Other factors are the complexity of the business, the number of products developed, and the competitive environment. * What are the Stage-Gate basics we should know? All organizations will use stages tailored to their environment, but there are three primary stages with gates in between: * Scoping: We begin with a scoping stage that is two to four-weeks in duration. This involves preliminary market and customer research to understand a problem and its needs. Also, technical feasibility of a solution is investigated. * Business case: A business case is developed to assess and justify pursuing the product concept. The business case is used to determine if the project deserves further investment. * Develop: This is the stage where the product concept is developed into an actual product – physical goods or intangible service. * Between each stage is a gate, which is a meeting of senior managers who decide if the project should continue to the next stage. * A frequent topic I encounter with medium to large organizations is the need for a flexible or agile Stage-Gate, which implies some rigidity to the original Stage-Gate and the need to adapt it to groups doing agile development. How has Stage-Gate International responded to this?  Stage-Gate is about making sure you have the right information to make a business decision. Agile is a project management technique and you need the best project management technique for the technology that you’re developing.  The technique is actually independent of Stage-Gate.

TEI 062: Stage-Gate, agile Stage-Gate, and innovation tools used by 80% of the Fortune 1000 – with Mitch Kemp of Stage-Gate International

Most people, when asked, would share they want to work in a better organization. And, most organizational leaders would like to improve their company. How to accomplish both objectives is answered by organizational design. Product managers and innovators have an important role in this. The cross-functional nature of product management uniquely equips product managers to make significant impacts not only on product strategy but the organization as a whole. For those who desire organizational-level influence, product managers need to become organization architects. To learn about becoming an organizational architect, I interviewed John Latham, who is a social scientist and organizational architect with over 35 years of experience helping organizations improve their performance. Some of his clients include Boeing, Kawasaki, Tata, The Ritz-Carlton, British Airways, Motorola, Department of Energy and Lockheed Martin. John has deeply researched leadership and organizational design. His award-winning research has appeared in several journal articles including IDSA’s Innovation journal and the American Society for Quality. In this interview, you will learn: * what it means to be an organizational architect, * why product managers are uniquely equipped to become organizational architects, and * how to accomplish this.   Practices and Ideas for Product Managers, Developers, and Innovators Summary of questions discussed: * What has been your path to helping organizations transform for higher performance and to become the organization the leaders and employees really want? There’s really no established career path for transforming organizations and that’s one of the many parallels with the listeners who are product managers. There’s no established career path or university degree that you can go get. My first interest in these kinds of things – the interaction between people, processes and technology was when I was teaching at a flight simulator and we were tasked with developing a cockpit resource management training program, which essentially was the combination of leadership, team dynamics, and problem solving in a high-speed environment with both a technical system (the airplane) and an external environment which was often unpredictable. I became very interested in team dynamics and leadership and how all that interacted with the situation.  After that I became interested in organizations in general and encountered the same issues. I was involved with process improvement initiatives back in the quality movement in the ’80s and ’90s and this led me pretty quickly to overall organization assessment and improvement using performance excellence models like the Baldrige Criteria and other models that address everything from leadership and strategy and customer market focus to people processes and information and analysis.  I also spent a lot of time working with and researching successful organizations and how they did the transformation and sustained it. * You’ve written several books and articles – including ones that have won prominent awards for their contributions to this area of organizational transformation. In an article published  in “Innovation” from the Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA), you shared “Most organizations are like VCR’s blinking 12:00. They are poorly designed, out of date, and ill-prepared to survive, let alone thrive, in the modern environment.” What did you mean by that statement? There’s plenty of great organizations out there, but I’ve seen many that have a ton of documents, procedures, and artifacts that nobody really reads or pays attention to. It reminded me of all the features and functions that used to be on the VCR that didn’t get used. We used play, stop, record, and rewind.

TEI061: Product managers are uniquely prepared to transform organizations for greater success – with John Latham, PhD

I expect you’ll enjoy this wonderful discussion with the world-wide director of design at IBM, Karel Vredenburg. In this role, he leads design efforts, applying Design Thinking. He also conducts organizational transformation design workshops with senior executives at major companies around the world. Karel introduced User-Centered Design at IBM in 1993 and assumed a company-wide role only two years later. He has written over 60 conference and journal publications, authored a book titled “User-Centered Design: An Integrated Approach,” contributed chapters to other edited books, and has served as editor for special issues of notable design journals.  He also hosts the Life Habits podcast, which helps you learn new habits to optimize your life so that you can stay sane in this crazy world. I tracked Karel down after seeing he was a keynote speaker at the Product Innovation Management annual conference, where he spoke on the topic of “The Power of Design for Business.”   Practices and Ideas for Product Managers, Developers, and Innovators Summary of a few questions discussed: * How did you get your start in User-Centered Design? It was not a career path I was seeking. I was working on a PhD in cognitive science that led to examining the social phenomenon of a gender difference in computer use. That caused me to dig deeper, leading to research on how to increase the enjoyment of using computers, reduce anxiety, and related topics. My research results became very popular and one day a person at IBM called me and asked if I had thought of joining IBM. I decided to try it for a year and am still there, 27 years later. * You introduced UCD to IBM and rapidly went on to be responsible for design at IBM worldwide. This would lead me to believe that you think of design from the traditional cognitive science perspective of human-computer interactions. Yet, your keynote speech at the Product Innovation Management conference had a much broader context – design as a team sport involving all the functions of a company. How has your perspective of Design evolved? It has evolved in interesting ways. Most recently, there is a new movement focusing on design.  IBM accelerated its design emphasis by purchasing a company that did not provide a technology advantage for us but a design advantage. The company was using the latest methods of Design Thinking from David Kelly and the d.school at Stanford (e.g., Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford). They had taken those principles and put them on steroids for the purposes of business. We are embedding them in the culture at IBM. We do this by focusing on three different areas: (1) people, (2) places, and (3) practices – the 3 P’s of IBM design. For people, we are increasing the number of designers on staff, hiring over 500 in the last couple years with around 1100 in the company now.  Places are studios designed to accelerate Design Thinking and experiential learning among a small team, such as two products managers, two designers, and two engineers. We now have 26 studios around the world. The practices piece is all about the IBM Design Thinking framework, which is grounded in having empathy for the user. We can use this method to create absolutely anything, whether it’s a process, a back-end system, or the way to run your child’s soccer team. You start with deeply understanding the user and then being able to look at their experience, what pain points they have, and then creating solutions to those pain points. In the process you get clarity on which of the ideas are better than others and then create prototypes, gather feedback, and iterate. * In your roles you have worked with numerous product managers and product teams. What would you tell new product managers to help them be more successful in their careers? Become a T-shaped person.

TEI 060: Design Thinking for greater innovation – with IBM Design Director Karel Vredenburg

Leading engineering teams from a strategic perspective of creating competitive products can be the source of a company’s growth. I interviewed Mike Paschal to explore this dimension of product development, management, and innovation. In our discussion he shares his experience building and leading engineering teams and applying the 3 P’s of business – people, product, and process. Mike has been in several software engineering related roles, serving as product manager, director of engineering, COO, and founder. He has worked for Intel, Sequent Computer Systems, Sun, Nortel, and other companies. One of his favorite roles is helping $5-10 million dollar companies scale to $50-100 million dollar companies. Scaling a business, regardless of where you start, is challenging work because businesses tend to operate differently each time they scale up and the differences are predictable.   Practices and Ideas for Product Managers, Developers, and Innovators A few questions discussed: * How did you get into product roles in the beginning of your career?  I was working as a software engineer on a blood analyzer product. The software engineering team volunteered me to be the project leader and interact with rest of the organization because none of them wanted to. In doing this work, I discovered that I had a talent for bringing people together to solve problems and come up with new ideas. That was the start that led to other roles as engineering manager and development manager. * How do you get people working effectively together on problems? When I was at Sun Microsystems, I learned a valuable lesson from my boss, Rich Green. He said, “Mike, people on your staff are smart. You’re a smart guy; they’re smart too, and you won’t be the smartest one in the group. What you have to do is get them all going in the right direction. You have to get them all on the same page.” When I brought the team together, I would let the discussion progress for a while and then I would end it by saying, “Okay, here’s the idea and let’s summarize it. Does anybody have a better idea?” When no better ideas are offered, the discussion tends to be over and everyone is moving in the same direction. Another approach I used when working with people that had much deeper knowledge in an area than I had was to share a half-baked idea. I would bring the team together and share an idea. The experts would start attacking the idea but in the process uncover gems that others built upon. It was an effective way to get people to collaborate – being willing to offer an incomplete idea, have it cut up and dissected to foster collaboration among the group. * What is a barrier that prevents a company from scaling – to go from being a $10M company to a $100M company? You have to confront the brutal facts. This means being honest about what you’re good at, what you’re not good at, your position in the market, your product weaknesses and defects, issues with your support process, and the experience you create for your customer. There must be transparency in the organization and a willingness to confront problems. Another issue is not having what Jim Collins calls the Hedgehog concept. This is the intersection of what you’re passionate about, what you’re best at, and what generates revenue. Companies need to understand their hedgehog – what they are better at than anyone else. Useful links: * Mike’s LinkedIn Profile   Innovation Quote “It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.” –Franklin D. Roosevelt   Listen Now to the Interview   Raw Transcript   Thanks!

TEI 059: Leading product teams and scaling a business- with Mike Paschal, Product EVP

I have a special guest today from the Great White North. It is cold at home in Colorado as I write this, but it was much colder at Allan Neil’s home in Toronto, Canada. Allan is a fellow product management podcaster, hosting Ready Product Radio. Allan asked if he could interview me for his podcast and I suggested we do the interview here instead to introduce The Everyday Innovators to his helpful podcast – another great free resource for product managers. Allan brings his 20 years of product management experience to each episode of Ready Product Radio. In our discussion, I share my personal journey to product management and how my experiences – successes and failures – along with focused education on product management and innovation, led to creating the Product Mastery Roadmap that shows how product managers become PRODUCT MASTERS. The Roadmap charts the path for product managers to 5X, or more, their product success rate as well as their career success.   Practices and Ideas for Product Managers, Developers, and Innovators Summary of questions discussed: * For people new to Ready Product Radio, what is a good first episode to listen to?  Episode 15 is a recap of my 2015 interviews and is a great place to start (see links below). * Chad, how did you get started in product management? After studying electrical engineering in college, I joined a small company. Within six months the office had tripled in size and we are rapidly becoming more of a software company than an engineering company. I enjoyed working with customers, understanding the problem they wanted a solution to, and developing prototypes of product concepts. I had the opportunity to work with a group of potential customers for a week in their offices. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was essentially doing ethnographic research. After that week I had a clear understanding of the problems they needed to solve and their work environment, which allowed me to build a prototype that later turned into a very successful product. My journey learning about product management involved leading software development teams, investigating project management, diving into product management concepts, and eventually earning a PhD in Innovation. Along the way I added certifications in product management, new product development, and innovation. * When did you start training other product managers? In 2006 I earned the New Product Development Professional certification from PDMA. It integrated 6 knowledge areas in a way that helped me make a lot of sense out of product development and management. The knowledge areas include: (1) Business and Product Strategy, (2) Product Development Process, (3) Portfolio Management, (4) Leading, Managing, and Working with Teams and People, (5) Project and Product Tools and Metrics, and (6) Market and Customer Research. After this, I started helping the Denver, Colorado PDMA group prepare people for the NPDP exam. A friend, Lynne Vanarsdale, created a pilot for a study group program that met in person and I evolved that ultimately to an online study group and then an eCourse. I have helped many people prepare for and pass the NPDP certification exam. Later, I got involved with AIPMM, helping to lead creation of their Certified Innovation Leadership (CIL) program. I developed and refined online eCourses for both the NPDP and CIL certifications with valuable help from Jama Bradley, who first taught me the NPDP concepts. From there, companies began contacting me to conduct product management and innovation workshops and assessments for them. Today, I also facilitate product and innovation management courses for Colorado State University, Boston University, and Walden University. I have trained product managers at Microsoft, Kind Snacks, Level 3, Kohler, John Deer, J.D. Power, GHX, FedEx, Cummins, Compassion, Clorox, Cisco, Mastercard, SAIC, Thomson Reuters,

TEI 058: How to 5X your product management career- with Allan Neil & Chad McAllister, PhD

The Lean Startup approach has brought a lot of visibility to the importance of getting out of your office and interacting with actual customers. And you do that so you can understand the details of their problems related to the solution or product you envision as a product manager and innovator. However, accomplishing this brings up questions like: who do we talk with, what do we ask them, and what information is most important. The practical answers to all these questions is in a framework called Jobs-to-be-Done. When used properly, it positions product managers to greatly increase the success of the products they develop – because the products are solving a real job the customer has in a way the customer recognizes as being most valuable to them and easiest to choose. To learn about this framework, I went to the source – the person who runs the website http://Jobstobedone.org, which has the support of Clayton Christensen, who was one of the original creators of the framework. This person is Chris Spiek. Chris is a software programmer who discovered the Jobs-to-be-Done framework and used it to create successful software products customers loved. He has also been a founder and co-founded his current company, the Re-Wired Group, which is a firm based in Michigan that creates improved products and new products for their clients by applying Jobs-to-be-Done.   Practices and Ideas for Product Managers, Developers, and Innovators Summary of questions discussed: * Your background is in software development. What took you from that to product management? I was involved in custom software development. Customers often pushed for more features, making negotiations and managing scope creep very challenging. I realized I needed to learn more about what the customers of my customer really needed. That led me to learning about customer personas, big data, and more. At the same time, I started doing work for Bob Moesta, who was one of the co-creators, along with Clay Christensen, of the Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD) framework. His specifications for products were a bit different from what everyone else was doing, yet they were always wildly successful. In 2008 Bob and I started the Rewired Group to apply, refine, and teach the JTBD framework.   * You tell people that “you develop great products that people want to buy using Jobs-to-be-Done.” How do you describe JTBD? It’s a way of gaining an understanding of how someone decides to purchase something new.  For example, think about the last product you purchased and ask: what was your motivation to make the purchase, what was your thought process, and how did your opinions change over time? At its core, it is a framework for thinking about how purchasing decisions are made. An example is buying a shovel to dig a hole. If you are the product manager trying to sell more shovels, the traditional approach is to think about what would make the customer love your shovel more. This might lead to different colors, lighter-weight materials, etc. Instead, JTBD prompts us to change the perspective and ask why the customer needs to dig a hole and what are the other ways this could be accomplished. This leads to realizing that the shovel is not competing with other shovels at the hardware store but with other ways of getting a hole dug.   * How are jobs identified? Can you walk us through an example using JTBD – who was interviewed, what questions were asked, what was discovered? One of the first applications was for the Snickers candy bar. The Snickers bar was competing head-to-head with Milky Way. Both were Mars’ products, similar to each other, and one was going to be retired. Bob Moesta was asked to help the Snickers’ product team. Bob ended up talking with people who purchased Snickers and people who purchased Milky Ways,

TEI 057: Applying the Jobs-to-be-Done Framework – with Chris Spiek

Most companies talk about wanting to be more innovative, but few take the steps needed. In this discussion, I discovered the five steps organizations can take to be more innovative, from someone who has successfully executed the steps many times. Recently, Ingersoll Rand was ranked #9 for Innovation in Fortune’s Most Admired Companies 2015. They made the #9 ranking the very first year they appeared on the Fortune list – a great accomplishment.  Clearly something is changing at the company in terms of innovation, and this change is being driven by Michael Wynblatt.  He is the Vice President of Innovation & Emerging Technology at Ingersoll Rand. He has also led innovation at other companies, helping more than 40 technology-based products come to market. This includes serving as the VP of Innovation for Eaton Corporation and the VP and Chief Technology Officer at the Siemens Technology to Business Center. Throughout these roles he has learned a great deal about helping companies become more innovative and specifically how to create a culture that breeds innovation.   Practices and Ideas for Product Managers, Developers, and Innovators Summary of questions discussed: * What is the charter of your role as VP of Innovation and Emerging Technology at Ingersoll Rand? My main responsibility is to build the innovation capability of the entire organization. This includes developing processes, tools, and methods and then providing training for these. I also have a team that models and demonstrates what good innovation process looks like. * How did that role come into existence? The role has existed for 3.5 years.  The need for the role came about because the company has been undergoing a transformation to take advantage of the synergies between the businesses through a business operating system. We are creating functional expertise around a lot of different areas, including human resources and engineering and operations, and innovation was one of those. * At the Back End of Innovation conference you spoke on creating an innovative culture in large organizations. You know a lot about this as you have accomplished it at three large industrial companies. What does it mean to have a culture of innovation? Culture is how the company behaves and what we do. To have a culture of innovation, you need three things. (1)  Your leadership must aggressively promote the expectation that you should identify new ideas. (2) Resources actually get prioritized for taking action on groundbreaking ideas. (3) Your employees prefer to join the teams that are working on those game-changing kind of topics. * You created a series of steps for creating an innovative culture. What is the first step? Step 0 (I start with 0 because I was trained as a computer scientist) is setting expectations that creating an innovation culture is a multi-year journey. In one experience I had, the first three years of the journey didn’t product a lot of success but that dramatically changed after year three. It takes time to get the culture thinking and acting differently. * What is the next step – Step 1 in your numbering system? Step 1 is adopting an innovation methodology. Any innovation methodology is better than none – find one that works for your organization. A key here is what I call standardizing the antidote. Identify the real barriers that are preventing innovation today. Pick one or two that are really critical and make doing the opposite the standard in the company. That is how barriers are removed. * What is Step 2? Next, you’re going to need some examples of success and people to create the successes. I call this step building the army – those people eager to be trained with the right skills and can hit the ground running in a very short order to create success. The specialists are the soldiers and the success ...