The Everyday Innovator Podcast for Product Managers

Ash Maurya is the author of “Running Lean: How to Iterate from Plan A to a Plan that Works.” Educated as an electrical engineer, he worked in software development before founding his first company, WiredReach. He is now the founder and CEO of Spark59, which equips entrepreneurs to succeed by providing tools, content and coaching. I discovered his work when I was looking for additional information on the Business Model Canvas – a popular one-page approach to creating a business plan. I wanted a canvas to help me formulate a business model for a product and I discovered Ash’s Lean Canvas and Lean Stack tools that help entrepreneurs, startups, and product managers create products customers want. Practices and Ideas for Product Managers, Developers, and Innovators Highlights from the discussion include: * When you are in Austin, TX, try Ash’s favorite breakfast tacos at Tacodeli. * Try yoga for physical strength and mental focus. * 3 stages of a startup that apply to product development * The Artists are Starving: inspired by building something new, but have to eat, too. Need to find a sustainable business model. * The Artists Have to Survive: product pivots can result in a sustainable business, but it may no longer be one that inspires its creators. * The Entrepreneurs (no longer Artists) Must Find Purpose in their Customers: purpose and passion for the work that is creating products customers value. * Entrepreneurship, as well as new product development, is not risky – these activities apply risk management techniques and control risk. * The seed for the book “Running Lean” started after exploring the early works of Steve Blank and Eric Ries and the desire to test product concepts more quickly. * A “Lean” approach is defined by Ash as one that maximizes quickly learning about the riskiest aspects in product concepts. * Contrasted with Agile development approaches, that measures performance in terms of completed features, Lean is concerned with the value the product delivers to the customer. * The core issue in product management is not “Can we build the product” but “Will customers care” if the product is built. * The Lean approach involves running small fast experiments to test what customers want and what creates value. * Properly conducted, customer interviews provide the information product managers need to understand the customer’s problem. * Ethnography – being a fly on the wall observing customers – is also very effective to better understand the problem that needs to be solved. * Ultimately customers don’t care about your solution, they care about their problems and how to solve them. * Ash’s blog, Practice Trumps Theory, is full of valuable how-to information for product developers and managers. His next book will take shape on his blog before it is published. * The Lean Canvas provides a one-page business model that works as well for startups as it does product managers. It consists of nine elements: * Customer segments * Channels * Customer problems * Solution * Value proposition * Revenue streams * Cost structure * Success metrics * Unfair advantage Special Bonus: Get a Lean Canvas Template  and Ash’s

Brian Ottum is a market research specialist with 30 years experience in new product development. He started as a chemical engineer and joined Procter Gamble, contributing to Charmin, Pampers, and other products you know. He went on to earn a PhD in Market Research. Today, he helps Kimberly-Clark, Johnson Controls, Thomson Reuters and other companies with product development. BTW, he also is an amateur astronomer, star gazing since he was 12 years old – and he is serious – while he lives in Michigan, last year he built a remotely controlled telescope station in New Mexico to take advantage of clear skies. Practices and Ideas for Product Managers, Developers, and Innovators Highlights from the discussion include: * Qualitative and quantitative approaches to customer research. * The blessing of realizing what work you don’t want to do. * Be sure you really know the characteristics of a product that provide customers real value, and how customers make trade off decisions. E.g., diapers that don’t leak are much more important than diapers that look like underwear. * New product development projects can take on a life of their own and be difficult to make adjustments to once they get rolling – hard to stop the train. * If you have customer data that suggests a product will not be successful, it is much better to kill the project quickly than to continue wasting resources on it. The earlier the better. However, this can be a challenge and requires courage. * Metrics and objectives can mislead product efforts. If an executive’s bonus is based on getting a new product to market and not on the quality of the product, bad decisions can be made. * Choose metrics wisely – too often they can be used in unintended ways. * Test everything. Never carry ideas into development without first testing them with consumers. * Even if you “know what customers want,” get the data to verify you are correct. * Best qualitative research tool is ethnography – observing customers. * Best quantitative research tool is conjoint analysis. * Look at the PDMA Tool Book series for detailed information on customer research tools. Innovation Quote “Because the purpose of business is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two–and only two–basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs. Marketing is the distinguishing, unique function of the business.” Peter Drucker   Listen Now to the Interview   Raw Transcript Thanks for Listening! Thank you for joining me again. I love discussing product development and learning from the successes and failures of product innovators. If you enjoyed the discussion, help out a fellow product innovation professional by sharing it using the social media buttons you see below.

Andrew Warner is the master of learning from entrepreneurs. As the founder of Mixergy, he has interviewed over 1000 entrepreneurs, sharing what they did to become successful. Prior to Mixergy, he was an accomplished entrepreneur with an internet business selling greeting cards that generated over $30M/year in revenue. However, his path was not always paved with successes – he learned from his costly failures and mistakes – and eventually created Mixergy to discover how successful products and companies are created. Watch Andrew’s interviews with successful entrepreneurs at Mixergy.com Practices and Ideas for Product Managers, Developers, and Innovators Highlights from the discussion include: * Product innovators and entrepreneurs struggle with the “counter-mind” that tells us our plans will not work * An example of the “counter-mind” is wanting to go for a run but your counter-mind telling you that you don’t have time, or knowing that you need to contact customers but your counter-mind telling you that they won’t be interested * After spending $300,000 developing an invitation system for events, Andrew realized it was a failure. He had not asked for feedback on the product concept before developing it * Talk with potential customers about the product concept to learn about their real problems and how your product can provide value * Use an iterative approach to develop and refine product concepts, learning from customers as you go * Andrew shared his minimal viable product (MVP) approach he used for creating a training product. Highlights include: * Don’t create a product before knowing that it offers sufficient value to become a winner. * The best way to validate a product is to ask customers to pay for it before it actually exists and then co-create it with them. * Andrew emailed past customers asking about a specific problem he suspected they had. The response was positive. * He then created a web page with a “yes” button that asked if people had the problem. * If they clicked “yes” that web page asked what more they wanted to learn. * If they responded by typing topics and questions, then the web page told them a training product would be created if enough people wanted it but they had to pay for it now by credit card. The webpage also said their money would be completely refunded if an insufficient number of people responded. * With this process, Andrew quickly validated a need, engaged customers in co-creating a product, and established paying customers to prove sufficient demand existed.   Innovation Quote I didn’t have time with Andrew to discuss an innovation quote, but he emailed me a favorite after the interview.  He picked this one because whenever he wants to launch something new, a voice in his head says, “but it’s not ready.” This is a great quote for those times… “If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.” – Reid Hoffman   Listen Now to the Interview   Raw Transcript Thanks for Listening! Thank you for joining me again. I love discussing product development and learning from the successes and failures of product innovators. If you enjoyed the discussion, help out a fellow product innovation professional by sharing it using the social media buttons you see below.

Karla Phlypo is an avid dreamer, builder, artist, and scholar. She holds a Ph.D. combining research in social innovation, knowledge management, and decision science. Her background is in automotive product engineering. Although she has many interests, the common thread is contributing to a culture of sharing and innovation through collaboration. Practices and Ideas for Product Managers, Developers, and Innovators Highlights from the discussion include: * Karla’s innovation experiences began as a young girl when she dismantled her father’s lawnmower, without permission! * “Appreciative Inquiry” is a tool for facilitating a group innovation session that focuses on positives (not problems) and understanding different perspectives (see short tutorial) * Karla studied how people participate in innovation environments (open, crowdsourcing, and collaborative communities) * Key contributors needed in innovation environments are solution providers that tend to be quiet (may not offer ideas until asked to do so), non-political, and boundary-less with a systems view * Quirky (https://www.quirky.com/invent) is an interesting open community for inventing and influencing new product designs * Organizational innovation is improved by knowledge managers who aid the flow of knowledge in an organization and identification of best practices * “Hardy perennials” are not flowers, but problems that keep showing up in product efforts that need to be pruned * Inspiration comes from many places. A GM engineer found inspiration by examining toy cars * Idea management systems that collect suggestions for employees can destroy trust when they don’t understand how their ideas are used – they can be counter-productive when not managed properly * Open innovation requires trust and coherence. * Cob building, construction with mud and straw, is in Karla’s future. Connect with Karla on her blog, Distilled Wisdom. Innovation Quote “I have no special talent, I am just passionately curious.” – Albert Einstein   Listen Now to the Interview   Raw Transcript Thanks for Listening! Thank you for joining me again. I love discussing product development and learning from the successes and failures of product innovators. If you enjoyed the discussion, help out a fellow product innovation professional by sharing it using the social media buttons you see below.

George Farkas is CEO of an electronics engineering service company in the Pacific Northwest called Tsuga Engineering. His company creates portable power components for electronic devices, such as integrated power in backpacks and business cases. Over his career George has helped several companies develop products that provide customers value.  He is also certified as a New Product Development Professional (NPDP) by the Product Development and Management Association (PDMA). Practices and Ideas for Product Managers, Developers, and Innovators Highlights from the discussion include: * As an avid rock climber as a kid as well as an adult, George learned to take, manage, and mitigate risk – lessons he applies now to product development. * Working well as a team by developing trust and collaboration is essential for product development projects. * Huge advantage to a holistic product development process that applies a team approach and starts by meeting with customers face-to-face, then developing prototypes, and verifying the prototypes with customers. * Product development can benefit from good sales management experience by having the best interest of the customer in mind. * The winning product formula is developed by studying the customer and collaborating as a cross-functional team to deliver what the customer values. * Using aggregate market data only, in isolation from real customers, results in a “me too” product that is more likely to be a failure. * Face-to-face voice of the customer and ethnographic research leads to innovative insights. * Watch out for those who say “we know what the customer needs” – the way to know is to iterate and co-develop prototypes with customers. * Wrong assumptions early in the process can set product development work on a path that leads to failure because time is not available to correct the issues. * Skipping proven product development and management processes leads to expensive failures. * Executives role in product innovation includes developing the company culture to support innovation and create alignment in strategies. * Executives need to understand the best practices in product innovation processes and know that such training exists. * Don’t compromise a good product concept with a poor user experience. * Don’t design a product based on opinions – base the design on real customer needs.   Innovation Quote George shared a favorite innovation quote he paraphrased and attributed to Fred J. Palensky, 3M, Companies whose innovation processes are strong and whose cultures strongly support those processes process a huge advantage.   Listen Now to the Interview   Raw Transcript Thanks for Listening! Thank you for joining me again. I love discussing product development and learning from the successes and failures of product innovators. If you enjoyed the discussion, help out a fellow product innovation professional by sharing it using the social media buttons you see below.

Louise Musial, VP of Business Strategy at PCD Works, is an author of numerous articles for technical magazines and lecturer on the topics of Innovation, Open Innovation, and business trends in R&D. We met at the Product Innovation Management conference, where she participated in the New Product Development Professional (NPDP) certification preparation workshop I conducted. At the conference she presented “Working with Small Companies to Expand Your Open Innovation Capabilities” which she also wrote about in the book “Open Innovation: New Product Development Essentials from PDMA.” Practices and Ideas for Product Managers, Developers, and Innovators Highlights from the discussion include: * Shocking, but tech startups in Silicon Valley don’t find human-waste-eating microbes sexy * A natural curiosity about how things work and figuring things out as a child contributed to Louise’s interest in innovation * An example of a partnership with a University research group that led to commercializing a product that makes clean water from waste water. * The need for innovation in water – availability of clean water and reclamation of waste water * Distraction-free innovation with the right people involved creates focus, which is the aim of Louise’s innovation campus on 80 acres in the country * How the problem is framed impacts the solution * Putting aside assumptions can create paths that lead to innovations * Story telling is a useful tool for product innovators – filter what is unnecessary and keep the message simple but compelling * Carefully observing customers is an important aspect of voice of the customer research * Asking the same question multiple times in different ways improves understanding and can uncover assumptions * When discussing requirements, ask “What does that mean to you?” * Keep ideation teams small (12 or less) and take steps to break down barriers, develop rapport, and establish trust to be effective * Sketching concepts helps explore concepts as a group * Knowledge is created through what we learn from failures * Failures are steps to innovation – the belief that “it is possible” creates breakthroughs   Innovation Quotes “If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.” -Elon Musk “If we worked on the assumption that what is accepted as true is true, then there would be little hope for advance.” -Orville Wright   Listen Now to the Interview   Raw Transcript Thanks for Listening! Thank you for joining me again. I love discussing product development and learning from the successes and failures of product innovators. If you enjoyed the discussion, help out a fellow product innovation professional by sharing it using the social media buttons you see below.

Brian Gardner is the founder of StudioPress, creator of the Genesis Framework and Themes for WordPress, and Chief Product Officer at Copyblogger, the company that teaches business owners how to do online marketing that works. He is an ideal example of a product innovator and business creator.  Brian saw a need and created a solution that people valued and were willing to pay for. He continues to be the “idea guy” behind product innovations at StudioPress. Brian and I met through charities we support that are both making a difference in the lives of people by providing clean water – Charity Water and Compassion Water of Life. Practices and Ideas for Product Managers, Developers, and Innovators Highlights from the discussion include: * Test the feasibility of product concepts with customers before beginning development. As an example, Brian asked people if they would buy a WordPress theme before he started creating it * Innovative products are often borne out of necessity to solve problems and create value for customers * As an example of innovation, Brian shares the creation of the Genesis Framework to separate WordPress theme functionality from theme layout and style * A familiar user experience increased acceptance of Brian’s products * Always listening to the customer community and being responsive to feedback leads to product improvements and new products customers want * Learning takes place through trying things for yourself and experimenting * Observing what is working for others is a good source of ideas * Project management and customer service experiences prepared Brian for creating his own company * Just-in-time-learning of what you need to know quickly increases your value * Max Lucado describes a methodology for finding your “sweet spot” and living the life you want in his book “Cure for the Common Life” * The merger of StudioPress with Copyblogger provided the opportunity for Brian to be part of a larger team, delegate activities he did not enjoy, and focus more on his strengths * Innovation takes a team of people with different strengths to be successful   Brian’s Advice for Innovators * Test feasibility of product concepts * Identify trends in the market * Benchmark competitors to see what they are doing well and how you are positioned in the market * Gain insights from the customer community   Listen Now to the Interview   Raw Transcript Thanks for Listening! Thank you for joining me again. I love discussing product development and learning from the successes and failures of product innovators. If you enjoyed the discussion, help out a fellow product innovation professional by sharing it using the social media buttons you see below.

Welcome to my first “Everyday Innovator” discussion with a product development professional. For my inaugural interview, I had the pleasure of discussing product development with industrial designer, Darshan Rane, who creates prosthetics for Otto Bock Healthcare.  He enjoys creating products that provide an exceptional consumer experience. He has developed products in the fields of healthcare, fitness, and martial arts. Practices and Ideas for Product Managers, Developers, and Innovators Highlights from the discussion include: * Industrial designers are found in a wide range of organizations beyond Apple and automotive manufacturers. They are involved in all aspects of innovation, from identifying ideas and conducting user research through product development and commercialization. * Understand what users need and value by: * observing * asking “correct” questions and avoiding assumptions * “walking in their shoes” * A cradle-to-cradle view is needed when designing a product * Unlock the power of open-ended questions by adding “what else” * Understand the constraints of the product development project, such as cost objectives, shipping restrictions, reimbursement levels, etc. * Only fight with your customers when developing fighting products! * and, a bit funny, keep units of measurements clear – there is a big difference between inches and centimeters as a designer! Innovation Quote Darshan shared one of his favorite innovation quotes, “If you can dream of it, you can make it happen.” Listen to the discussion to hear the back story about the quote and why it is empowering. Listen Now to the Interview   Raw Transcript Thanks for Listening! Thank you for joining me again. I love discussing product development and learning from the successes and failures of product innovators. If you enjoyed the discussion, please share it using the social media buttons you see below.

Welcome to the first episode of a new podcast for product managers, developers, and innovators! The podcast is all about helping people involved in developing and managing products become more successful, grow their careers, and STANDOUT from their peers. I’m Chad, the host, and I shared five topics to introduce the  podcast: 1. How I became fascinated with product management, development, and innovation and why I teach the topics now 2. Why I am conducting valuable interviews, including how I started interviewing during a 1-year RV trip 3. Highlights of some innovation lessons from past interviews 4. What to expect in the upcoming weekly interviews with professionals that can help product managers, developers, and innovators 5. A free gift for listening About the Host I was a boy who loved to take apart things to see what was inside – what made something work. Not too much of a stretch that I found a love for electrical engineering during college. After graduating, I worked with teams in In small, large, and global companies, including four start-ups, developing products. Sometimes the products made customers into raving fans and sometimes it was left to me to pick up the pieces and figure out what went wrong. In pursuit of best practices and proven methodologies, I found great value in earning certifications from several credible professional organizations, including PMI, PDMA, and AIPMM, as well a PhD in business (focusing on requirement issues in product development). Today, with 25+ years in hands-on product development, I provide training and education.   Highlights from the Episode Include: * What product managers, developers, and innovators do. * Chad’s path to product innovation * Why taking a year-long RV trip was a great way to create family experiences and learn from business owners, entrepreneurs, and product professionals * Highlights from three interviews during the RV trip: * * The importance of market trends from an interview the Bob Tiffin (Tiffin Motorhomes) * How the 3 P’s of culture (personal, powerful, and persuasive) create a compelling story and competitive advantage from an interview with Dan Rattigan (French Broad Chocolate Factory) * Even when opportunities for product development and innovation are highly constrained, innovating the customer experience creates high value and differentiation from an interview with Mike Yontz (McDonalds Owner/Operator) * Each week, come back here to hear what product managers, developers, and innovators, along with other knowledgeable experts, have learned from their failures and successes to help you be more successful in your career * How to receive the free gift for listening to this episode Innovation Quotes I love innovation quotes. I ask many of my guests to share a quote and why it is important to them. I have too many favorites to list here, but one that encompasses a basic truth for innovators is a Japanese proverb: “Fall down seven times, get up eight.” While this applies to life in generally, product innovators must have resilience. We face failures frequently, but each is valuable in the lessons we learn and what we discover about customers and products in the process. So, don’t sweat the falling down because getting up is the important part!