Product Mastery Now for Product Managers, Leaders, and Innovators

Amruta Moktali, Chief Product Officer at Skyflow, discusses the crucial elements for building and managing amazing product teams in the realm of data privacy. Topics include creating cohesive teams, recognizing individual motivations, embracing mistakes for growth, and leveraging insights from Skyflow's offerings.

Dr. Emily Anhalt, psychologist and emotional fitness consultant, discusses the concept of emotional fitness for product managers. She explains that emotional fitness is a proactive approach to mental health and highlights the importance of self-awareness in leadership. The podcast explores the parallels between emotional and physical fitness, debunking the stigma around therapy. It also emphasizes the significance of self-awareness, empathy, and boundaries in product management and leadership. The speakers stress the power of emotional fitness for better communication and effective leadership.

Five mindsets every product manager should cultivate I am interviewing speakers at my favorite annual conference for product managers, the PDMA Inspire Innovation Conference. This discussion is with Matt Phillips, whose session is titled “The Mindsets of Breakthrough Innovators.” Matt shared that successful innovators and entrepreneurs think differently from other people. Further, the way they think can be learned. Using examples from Pixar, Google, Netflix and even ultramarathoners, we can learn the secrets to unlocking innovation as well. Matt will help us. He is the founder of Phillips & Co., a Chicago-based innovation strategy firm. This episode is sponsored by PDMA, the Product Development and Management Association. PDMA is a global community of professional members whose skills, expertise, and experience power the most recognized and respected innovative companies in the world. PDMA is also the longest-running professional association for product managers, leaders, and innovators, having started in 1976 and contributing research and knowledge to our discipline for nearly 50 years. I have enjoyed being a member of PDMA for more than a decade, finding their resources and network very valuable. Learn more about them at PDMA.org. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:35] Help us be better innovators. What mindsets should we have if we want to be breakthrough innovators? We often spend time learning new methodologies of innovation, but we rarely stop to change the way we think. When I’ve met incredible VPs of innovation, CEOs, or entrepreneurs, I don’t walk away with a four-step process. They just think differently when they walk down a grocery store aisle or talk to someone they just met. Their way of seeing the world is different. I’ll take us through five mindsets. [4:49] Be a gap spotter. Many incredible entrepreneurs talk less about products and more about gaps. They go through life spotting problems. An entrepreneur based in Texas, Chris Corner, had a friend who owned a bakery business, which did not sell online. Chris suggested that as an experiment they put a QR code on all the bread. That took off and he built an entire platform to sell his friend’s bread online. He then built that into a larger platform to sell things online. During the pandemic, Chris and his family were at home and they wanted snacks from Buc-ee’s, a massive Texas convenience store known for their snacks. Chris found that Buc-ee’s did not sell online. He called the company and told them he wanted to build an online store for them, but no one got back to him, so he decided to do it himself. He bought $1400 of snacks at Buc-ee’s, photographed it, and built a website called Buc-ee’s Store. Immediately the lawyers called. He had taken their trademark. Interestingly, the lawyers did not say cease desist. They told Chris to change the name but he was welcome to keep selling Buc-ee’s things online. He scaled the business, which is now called TexasSnacks.com. They continue to buy things at full retail price from multiple Buc-ee’s stores and sell them online. What I love about that is it’s slightly insane to take your kids and buy $1400 worth of snacks, but the bigger thing is Chris is a gap spotter. He goes through life seeing these problems, and instead o f saying, “That’s a bummer,” he immediately says, “That’s an opportunity. Let’s jump on it.” That’s true of both entrepreneurs and people in corporate America who are incredible repeat innovators. [9:36] Multiply your magic. John Osher is a serial entrepreneur who has scaled amazing businesses. He built a toy company and then the first spinning lollipop. That gap here was small—you don’t want to lick with your tongue too many time. The spinning lollipop spins as you put your tongue against it. He sold that company off and spotted another gap. He decided to do what I call multiply your magic—take the thing you’re already good at and apply it to a new gap. Oral B and other companies make electronic toothbrushes, but they’re $70 or $80 and you have to plug them in. John realized if he changed the head on the spinning lollipop, he could make a $5 motorized toothbrush. That became the Crest Spinbrush. [11:44] Innovate with action. Justin Gold was an outdoorsy guy who liked to go hiking in Colorado. He started making nut butter to bring on his hikes. Sometimes when he came back, his roommates had eaten all his nut butter. He starting making more and taking it to a farmer’s market, where he sold out. He made additional jars for his friends, but he wrote his name and stuck it to his jar. His brand of nut butter is now called Justin’s because he stuck his name on his jars. He never set out to build a big company. He just continued to take the next step. He innovated with action. A lot of companies innovate with thinking. Justin started doing things, and when they worked he doubled down. Companies try to do focus groups and have weekly meetings to build confidence, but ironically in many cases confidence comes from action. If you take the nut butter to the farmer’s market, you get the confidence. [15:21] Go get a guru. A friend who has a small company was trying to get a packaged food product into stores. They had tried selling online and through Instagram, but it’s really tough. I asked if they had called Trader Joe’s or Target, and he said they had thought about but didn’t know how to do it. I told him to get a guru. There are people who do this all day long. At our consulting firm, when we’re stumped, we get a guru. For a modest amount of money, you can usually hop on the phone for two or three hours and totally unpack an industry. One of my favorite examples of getting a guru comes from Apple. Apple is the last place you would think they would have to find a guru, but when they were designing the Apple Watch, they found a guru, Mark Newson, an Australian interior designer. What’s humbling about that is even one of the most innovative companies in the world found a new guru. Companies are slow to do that. They think they need to hire someone or just work harder. Why not just call the people who can solve this much more quickly? [19:02] Persevere with passion. When you think about entrepreneurship, you definitely think about passion, but that word seems to come up less in corporate America. We tend to think we need to find competent people, not passionate people. You can pack a room with competent people and the project can grind to a halt very quickly because innovation is hard. It’s important to look for competency and passion. In innovation, there are a lot of sprints. I’ve come to believe sprints are important, but the marathon is more important. Research has found that incredible scientists who take on deep, long-term projects are often also runners. Ultramarathoners and scientists share a common trait that they’re willing to push that psychological payday into the future and enjoy the challenge. To create Star Wars, George Lucas had to write it, get funding, and get hired as the director, and along the way he also created two companies. He was a marathon runner. Not only is he creative, but every time when he came up to a barrier, he built entire technologies and companies to go after it. Passion is so important because when the CEO or CFO pulls funding because a problem is too hard to solve, a team of passionate people says, “We can push through this. We’re going to have to build a small company to do it, but it’s important.” [22:52] Where can we find sources of passion? Real marathon runners are all driven by some passion. That could be raising funds to fight a disease someone in their family has, pushing themselves, proving to their parents they can achieve something they didn’t think they could, or beating what they did last year. There’s usually some driving force behind it, and that bubbles over into our work lives. You can see people who really love the idea of creating something and putting a dent in the universe. Or they’re really passionate about growing revenue and what to do that by creating something. You see that passion not just in that first kickoff but every time. If I were within a corporate innovation, marketing, or strategy department, I would hire as much for passion as for competency. Action Guide: Put the information Matt shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links: Learn more about Phillips & Co. Connect with Matt on LinkedIn Innovation Quote “I knew that if I failed, I wouldn’t regret that. But the one thing I know I might regret is not trying.” – Jeff Bezos Thanks! Thank you for taking the journey to product mastery and learning with me from the successes and failures of product innovators, managers, and developers. If you enjoyed the discussion, help out a fellow product manager by sharing it using the social media buttons you see below. Source

How SCADpro is elevating product management through design We are talking about some of the lessons from integrating art, design, and business needs that have been learned by SCADpro—the Savannah College of Art and Design’s in-house design, research, and innovation studio—which is generating innovative designs and products for the world’s most influential brands, including Google, Amazon, and Apple. Joining us is Paul Stonick, the Vice President of SCADpro. Prior to SCAD, Paul spent 25 years in the corporate world leading world-class digital and user experience design teams, primarily in e-commerce, most notably with The Home Depot and Barclays. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [1:54] How do you view the intersection of art, design, and business? “Good design is good business,” quoting Thomas Watson from IBM. I like to view design as value. For a design team to show value, they have to be able to speak the language of business to their stakeholders. The work we do at the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) and SCADpro, our in-house design, research, and innovation studio, is the intersection of design and business. We don’t consider ourselves to be an art school but a creative university. Everything we do has some sort of business component woven into it. [4:25] Can you share some examples from SCADpro of how organizations have found value by approaching innovation from an art and design perspective? The Chick-fil-A drive thru was a SCADpro project. Several years ago they came to use wanting to rethink the outdoor dining experience. We designed the iPad experience, the flow, the orchestration, the uniforms, etc. We execute through a framework called Design Thinking. It’s a creative problem-solving tool, a human-centered approach to solving problems. Design doesn’t even have to be part of the output. For Chick-fil-A, the output was structure, process, and organization. That’s value because it’s a return-on-investment for Chick-fil-A. Another partner is Deloitte, which we helped tackle some of the most complex issues facing public-sector organizations. Recently we created a holiday campaign for the jeweler David Yurman. We’re providing value in all different ways. For these three examples, we had students coming together from 100 different majors and minors, 120 countries, and all 50 states. We provide a global perspective and diverse thinking. Our secret sauce is unconstrained thinking, pushing the envelope, and going to places you usually don’t go to find the answer. That’s what innovation is—creating magic moments for the customer. Innovation is not about taking it to the press or to the board because then you’re serving the wrong customer. [8:29] How do you apply Design Thinking? While we encourage our SCAD students to be creative and think big, we strive to never forget the needs of the client. Our process starts with understanding the wants, needs, frustrations, and behaviors of the user to make sure we’re building the right product. It’s much more expensive to build the wrong thing than to build the right thing. The beauty of Design Thinking is it marries creativity and critical thinking skills. It requires us to generate a lot of ideas, so students become comfortable with failure. It forces you to try out many ideas early on and not get invested in one because generally your first idea is never the best. The process harnesses creativity through inquiry. We have three offerings: a 48-hour design challenge, a 10-week partnership, and an executive experience in which we’re teaching other companies how to be creative again. We did a partnership to redesign the Atlanta Police Department’s patrol cars. The students dug into the history of the police department and met with officers to understand what they were looking for in these patrol cars. You can see that in the execution. A phoenix rising from the ashes represents Atlanta and six stripes on the side of the car represent the six zones and the motion of the phoenix. This creates an emotional connection because the cars became take-home vehicles for the patrol officers. Design Thinking starts with empathy. Once you have empathy, you start building the right think and putting yourself in the right shoes. The power of Design Thinking is it’s inclusive and it creates empowerment. You can solve anything through design. Design Thinking is like a Trojan horse that you can use to really create change and take design to a strategic level. [11:26] Tell us about the steps in a design challenge or partnership. For the patrol car project, 24 students came up with 24 options in 48 hours. It was a lot of pizza and not a whole lot of sleep, but it was a lot of fun. We presented the ideas to the mayor of Atlanta and the Chief of Police, and now it has gone to market. A 10-week partnership starts with a kickoff with the brand partner. Generally they come visit us and spend time with students. We ask questions and do a literature review to understand the problem we’re trying to solve. Over 10 weeks, we do research, define the problem, test, prototype, and validate what we’re building. We check in with the partner about one quarter of the way through the project. At the midpoint, we meet with the brand partner to make sure we’re solving the right problem. We give a final presentation, which is the delivery of the problem we are trying to solve. What makes us unique at SCADpro is the brand partners evolve with us all the way through the journey. This is not student work they’re getting. We deliver agency-level work. At the end, we deliver all the IP to the brand partner to use. [14:03] Tell us more about prototyping. Prototypes can be physical or digital depending on what we’re solving for. We have made physical prototypes of furniture for Mitchell Gold + Bob Williams and prototypes of redesigned UX and UI for NASA’s ice-measuring satellites. We have customers test the product and provide feedback to make sure we’re building the right thing. [21:31] Do you follow the approach to Design Thinking in Jake Knapp’s book or do you have a different take on Design Thinking? It’s pretty close to the recipe Jake is following. Bringing together people from different backgrounds is key at SCADpro and in the corporate world. While running Design Thinking at Home Depot, to solve problems we brought the right people together, including engineering, product, marketing, and legal. This allowed us to make sure we were solving the right problem the right way. When you involve leaders from the beginning, you’re going to have more buy-in. The UX team started to teach others and that put us at the center of the design process. At Home Depot, we taught other parts of the organization like finance how to use the Design Thinking framework to solve problems. We showed that we can solve anything. Design Thinking became a secret weapon. [24:24] How do you deal with people who think they aren’t creative? To quote a friend of mine, “Everybody is creative. Most people just forgot.” I’ve had people who say they can’t draw. That’s okay. You don’t need to draw because design doesn’t have to be part of the output and stick figures are fine. Design Thinking is more about a human-centered approach to problem solving. We teach people how to be creative again. It’s about opening your mind and understanding the problem-solving process. Action Guide: Put the information Paul shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links: Learn more about SCADpro Connect with Paul on LinkedIn Check out the book Paul contributed to, Calling All Nations about INXS Innovation Quote “Innovation is rarely authorized in large organizations, so when you fight bureaucracy, bureaucracy fights back. Corporate intrapreneurs, or ‘punks’ must be the catalyst, and change can’t happen without us.” – Paul Stonick Thanks! Thank you for taking the journey to product mastery and learning with me from the successes and failures of product innovators, managers, and developers. If you enjoyed the discussion, help out a fellow product manager by sharing it using the social media buttons you see below. Source

Steve Portigal, the go-to person on customer interviews, discusses the need for a second edition of his book 'Interviewing Users' due to changes in the field over the past 10 years. He emphasizes the importance of asking the right questions during customer interviews and shares insights on analyzing and synthesizing the data. The chapter also provides information about his work and resources to connect with him.

Andy Binns, a management advisor and author, shares strategies for fostering innovation in organizations. They discuss how established companies can compete with startups by building new ventures. Topics include the role of a Corporate Explorer, successful innovation strategies of companies like Microsoft, and the importance of passion and small experiments in corporate innovation.

Tony Belilovskiy explores turning customers' perceptions into numerical, objective data for product design and business cases. The podcast discusses understanding the voice of the customer, ranking and weighting customer needs, addressing measurement challenges, and focusing on customer needs in the hotel industry.

Dr. Merrick Furst, the Director of the Center for Deliberate Innovation at Georgia Tech, discusses the heart of innovation. Topics include diversity of authors, challenges in collaboration, startup and larger organization innovation, accidental vs deliberate innovation, discovering authentic demands, and understanding the customer's perspective.

Yaroslav Lazor, Founder and CEO of Railsware, discusses strategic product planning, bridging the gap between product managers and engineers, and the importance of alignment in successful product development. He also shares insights on overcoming challenges, building products using the Bridges framework, and their consultancy services.

How product managers can navigate leadership challenges Today we are talking about four leadership motions that enable increased organizational effectiveness and productivity and alleviate organizational friction, waste, and indecision. The motions reflect a need for leadership change as organizations struggle for higher performance while supporting employees. Sharing the four leadership motions with us is Janice Fraser. Janice built her career in Silicon Valley as a startup founder, product manager, and confidante for entrepreneurs and enterprise executives alike. She currently supports very large organizations including P&G in becoming more innovative and agile. She also guides several venture-funded startup companies, federal government entities, and non-profit organizations. She is the coauthor of Farther, Faster, and Far Less Drama: How to Reduce Stress and Make Extraordinary Progress Wherever You Lead. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:32] Why take on the topic of leadership from a product background? The product piece has always been with me. In my first job out of college, I was already creating new products. The instinct to make something out of nothing that helps people have a better life or solves their problems was an innate instinct in me. I started working at Netscape right after its IPO. It was the hottest startup in history. That was the time of the advent of a commercial public worldwide web and the first .com boom. Suddenly all these people were now startup founder and were creating something new, not just new products but whole new businesses and business models. There were a lot of really inexperienced, terrible leaders who were doing what I call flaily squanderness—startup founders just trying a bunch of things. Previously I had been working at some of the best managed, best run companies on the planet. The CEO of Netscape, Jim Barksdale, was influential to my thinking about what it is to be an effective leader during a time of hyper growth. My two journeys fused for me—helping people through new products and helping brand new leaders be effective in the heroic things they’re trying to do. For twenty years I was equally interested in both practices—how can you make great products and how can amateur leaders become effective and competent? Observing leadership and what is repeatable and effective became my hobby. My book, Farther, Faster, and Far Less Drama, is the result of a user-centered design challenge and answers a product-centric question, which is “How can regular people be extraordinary leaders on purpose?” [6:11] What are the four leadership motions? We call them motions because they’re simply things you can do to be a leader that are reliable and effective. Orient honestly Value outcomes Leverage the brains Make durable decisions I treat these like a spinner on a board game. If I’m stuck as a leader, I can spin the spinner, and wherever it lands will give me a new direction to start thinking in. These are things great leaders already do. We just wanted to name and describe them so we can do them on purpose whenever we need to. [7:25] Orient honestly Ask the questions “Where are we now? What makes this moment complicated? And are we all in the same place?” Before we can set goals and hope to achieve them, we have to know where we are. We have to know what makes this moment complicated before we can begin to untangle it and get everybody into the right place. [9:03] What’s an example of orienting honestly? I was facilitating an offsite for a small company, their first in-person event in a few years since COVID. There were some market conditions at the time that were making it hard for them to be profitable. To orient honestly, we did a sailboat retro. We drew a sailboat on a whiteboard and had team members name what’s holding the company back, represented by the anchor, what is the wind in our sails, what are the rocks up ahead, who is standing on the crow’s nest looking out ahead, where is each team member on the boat, etc. That allowed us to take a snapshot of where we were and learn what the team thought might be preventing us from being more profitable. As a result, we identified some actions to take. [11:45] Value outcomes In a traditional planning process, you write down a list of all the things you’re going to do to reach a goal with dates. Unfortunately, real-life conditions often disrupt your plans. As leaders we exist in this world where externalities are making our plans obsolete very quickly. We need to enable flexibility without losing sight of where we want to go. Value outcomes more than you value deliverables or activities in your plan. This releases the pressure to anticipate the path with perfect clarity. [14:51] How can we impact the culture to make changing the roadmap acceptable? It has to start at the leadership level. It’s a mindset as much as a behavior, and this mindset has to take root. “Execute according to plan” is so ingrained in all of us. Measure outcomes. Most organizations aren’t actually measuring the outcome. They’re using activities and deliverables as a proxy that assumes if they do those things, the outcome happens. As leaders, we have to start measuring and valuing results. [16:32] What’s an example of valuing outcomes? This is my product failure story. I had a startup company at the beginning of the boom in online learning. Our population was innovators and startup founders. We had a couple thousand customers around the world. We were offered some venture capital funding, and we were excited because we would be able to scale and have a much bigger impact. We were executing exactly according to plan—we were recording videos, putting them online, putting the supplies for our workshops into boxes, and shipping them around the world. We forgot to measure the impact of the activities we were doing. One of our employees was out in the field, and he came back and said, “People don’t want videos. They want you in person.” We had valued our roadmap, which said we would have an online presence, but our business failed to grow because we weren’t listening to customer feedback. I failed to notice we were not getting to the outcome of repeatable growth even though we were achieving our roadmap. We ended up having to sell the company before its time. [20:11] Leverage the brains Cross-functional, cross-level, or cross-generational collaboration makes us move more quickly and more effectively with better thinking. We wanted to find the patterns that allow people to be effective in collaboration. One pattern we found is there are three kinds of people who need to be invited to any meeting or decision: people with subject matter expertise, people with the authority to say yes, and people who have to live with the outcome. If you find a way to include each of those three people in your conversation, you’ll have a much richer problem-solving conversation. You’ll need some good facilitation skills to balance out power inequalities when you have that kind of cross-level collaboration. A small number of well-chosen collaborators will provide you with much more horsepower than you would have on your own. [24:35] Make durable decisions Durable decisions are like Carhartt’s pants, not the prettiest fashion but they really get the job done and stand the test of time. Decision-making can create inefficiencies if decisions are decided too quickly or too slowly. When decisions are made too quickly, trust can be broken. For example, you’re on a Zoom call and somebody makes a decision and you can see on the faces that nobody believes for a second that is the right thing to do. The decision is made but everyone goes off and does whatever they want anyway. That isn’t discovered for a week or two, and then trust and respect are eroded. People no longer believe the decision-making apparatus is effective, so there is chaos and misalignment. Decisions are made too slowly when we try to get consensus, asking, “Do we all agree this is the best decision?” This creates an artificially high standard of quality and agreement. It is better to disagree and commit. Rather than consensus we want to look for consent. To create durable decisions, I ask two questions: “If we went this direction, would it move us toward our outcome? And can we all live with it?” Action Guide: Put the information Janice shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links: Connect with Janice on LinkedIn Visit Janice’s website Check out Farther, Faster, and Far Less Drama: How to Reduce Stress and Make Extraordinary Progress Wherever You Lead Innovation Quote  “How do you go about having good ideas? You have a lot of ideas and throw away the bad ones.” – Linus Pauling Thanks! Thank you for taking the journey to product mastery and learning with me from the successes and failures of product innovators, managers, and developers. If you enjoyed the discussion, help out a fellow product manager by sharing it using the social media buttons you see below. Source