Product Mastery Now for Product Managers, Leaders, and Innovators

The secret recipe for organizational transformation Today we are talking about organizational change. As innovators, creating change is what we do. You may have already learned that change is not always welcomed, such as when the new product you created also cannibalizes an existing product your organization provides. Organizational change and transformation is challenging, and today we’ll learn how to navigate it more successfully, thanks to our guest Lisa Carlin.  She is a strategy execution specialist, scaleup mentor, and co-founder of FutureBuilders Group, a network of Organisational Development specialists. She works with ambitious leaders to turbocharge their transformation and business planning. Having begun her career with McKinsey and Accenture, Lisa’s experience has allowed her to achieve a 96% transformation program success rate, in comparison to only around a 30% success rate as reported by most research. Not bad Lisa. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:31] Why do organizations need to transform and what are some examples of transformation? What happens if you don’t transform? IBM did a fabulous job moving from mainframes to PCs, and they’re still in the market. But Kodak didn’t transform, and we know what happened to them. Transformation is driven by the need to keep up with the competition. That might mean a new strategy, new sales approach, or a new marketing approach. It doesn’t have to be a response to something wrong. It can be in response to a need for cost reduction, competition, stakeholder pressure, or mergers. Since COVID, a huge shift is going on in transformation, especially digital transformation. Eight to ninety percent of organizations are doing some form of digital transformation at the moment. There’s a big shift around skills-based organization, and now organizations hire for skills rather than thinking about a job design unit. With the shift to online, it’s easier than every to learn new skills, and we need to pick up skills. The World Economic Forum says over 40 to 50% of jobs are going to be obsolete by 2025. [7:16] What digital transformation are you seeing? Digital transformation has been around as long as digital technology has. Now, digital transformation is seen as a more comprehensive change in the organization. In the late nineties, cultural transformation was a little “out there,” and now it’s become mainstream. Now people see culture as a key lever for performance improvement. Working within the culture is important, and changing the culture is important. It’s not enough to just say we’re going to transform. It’s the difference between installation and implementation. You can’t just install transformation. You’ve got to actually implement it in the organization. [10:54] What is your secret recipe for a 96% success rate of organization transformation? There are three things: Culture Get out of the dark room A multidisciplinary approach Culture can be a prison or a playground for innovation. Your organizational culture can significantly hold your back from implementing new products or coming up with new product design ideas. Clayton Christensen spoke about creating a separate business unit for new product development and innovation because of the culture. In a large organization, some folks will be protective over their area and not think about the customer or business benefits as a whole. Work within the culture you’ve got. Figure out the culture. Choose the top three words that describe it. Then play to those issues. Get out of the dark room: Use co-design. Don’t develop products on your own and announce them to the organization. Talk to people in the organization and get them on board. A multidisciplinary approach: I use a model called the Future Builders Transformation Framework. It’s for executives and managers working in the transformation space who want to lead implementation faster and better. The model has three simple circles: Business: strategic commercial perspective that gives precision to the transformation Change: getting people involved in co-design Project: project management skills that build traction They all sit in a sea of Culture. We’re looking for a transformational approach in the middle, where the circles overlap. To deliver a successful transformation, we must make sure we have all three perspectives. If we don’t, we have to surround ourselves with people who do. If you can do that and attune your approaches to the culture you’re in, that’s when you can get the flywheel to return on investment and innovation. [27:28] When change is necessary, who needs to be part of it? It is necessary to work with everybody at all levels, because if you don’t, you’re missing out on important input. In one organization, we were helping with a big cultural change. We had the sense from a culture survey that the culture was very anti-innovation. We ran focus groups starting at the bottom of the organization with blue collar workers and worked our way up. We recorded what each group said then got somebody else to do a voiceover to protect people’s identities and played the recordings to the managers. We did that for five different levels of the organization. The managers heard that they were instilling a fear-based culture and being insensitive to the illiterate blue collar workers. After the transformation, one forklift driver said, “I used to be scared to come to work, and now I feel like my team’s got my back.” Only by talking to people at all different levels can you really unpack what’s happening. [31:42] Do you have another example of transformation? A large organization had a quality review program, and they weren’t getting any momentum. Their main issue was they were a large organization, over a hundred thousand people, in decentralized PNL units. They hadn’t tapped into the culture. Each part of the business was like its own mini business. Unless they could get every single business leader to champion a project, they wouldn’t get buy-in. They were trying to manage all their stakeholders separately. They tried to spray all these change management frameworks and pray it works. It doesn’t work unless you understand the culture. Action Guide: Put the information Lisa shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links: Check out FutureBuildersGroup.com Subscribe to Turbocharge Weekly, a free newsletter with tips on strategy execution, transformation, projects and change with over 6,000 subscribers 17 top transformation tips, the secrets to 96% success rate Turbocharge Your Transformation membership, a community supporting business leaders (including product managers, and those aspiring) to accelerate their strategy execution, projects and change Transformation Framework Innovation Quote “You can’t get to the Unicorn Zone by pushing harder. You must create a pull effect.” – Lisa Carlin 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

Shawn Houser-Fedor, R&D Senior Director at Hershey, shares how InnovationOps helped Hershey achieve innovation at scale. They discuss the benefits of working at Hershey, implementing an information management tool, prioritizing projects and gate reviews, and the tension between divergence and convergence in innovation.

The key ingredients of a successful product management team Today we are talking about how to build a great product team that in turn will build great products customers love. Joining us is a returning guest, Vidya Dinamani. She’s a product executive, advisor, and coach. She has over 20 years of experience in product management, including multiple executive roles at leading companies such as Intuit. Vidya founded Product Rebels, which teaches people hands-on ways to become stronger, customer-focused product managers. She’s coached hundreds of companies from startups to Fortune 50 and loves seeing people and teams transform when they understand how to build products that customers love.   Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [4:07] What are the characteristics of a good product team that is able to create great products for customers? There are three essential characteristics. First is having a customer mindset. Great product teams all understand the customer. This requires top-down support and leadership to create a culture that values and prioritizes customer-centricity. The second characteristic is an outcome focus. It’s important for product teams to prioritize delivering customer value and focus on outcomes rather than just outputs. Outcome-driven metrics like Net Promoter Score (NPS) can help drive behavior and guide decision-making to move the needle. The third characteristic is alignment. Alignment is the ability the understand the work the product team is doing in support of the business and product strategy. Great products teams are not just focused on the how; they also understand the what and the why. This alignment sets up the team for creativity, innovation, and a shared understanding of goals among team members. [16:05] What practical tips can product managers use to build a better product team? First, we need to assess the team’s mindset, competencies, and resources to identify any gaps and areas for improvement. For example, often the product team doesn’t have access to customer data, and that lack of resources is stopping the team from being a great product team. This evaluation helps us understand where we are currently strong and what steps we can take to enhance our team. Pick one area and dedicate resources and time to improving that one area. A bonus for building a team is to think about the end-to-end experience. Great product managers should consider all the connective tissue and all the points. Everyone thinks about the end-to-end experience—not just the immediate team of developers and designers, but also the support system, including customer support, marketing, and sales teams. When we as a product team makes changes, it’s important to involve a group of people who can think about the end-to-end experience. Great product teams and customer-centered organizations naturally prioritize the end-to-end perspective [25:17] Who should be part of a product team and what roles should they have? The textbook core is the triad: the product manager, the designer, and the developer. This is often the ideal setup for SaaS and technical products, but let’s not forget that every industry is different, and it’s crucial to consider your goals and your customers. In my experience, I’ve even had customers who were so invested in our solution that they volunteered to be part of our team. They felt like it was their product, and their contribution was invaluable. It’s essential to define what you’re trying to achieve and identify the key stakeholders who should be part of the core team. It’s not limited to just the technical product team. Salespeople, account managers, and customer success representatives can all play a role, depending on your specific objectives. It’s about bringing together the right people to make the entire project successful. And in sectors like healthcare and FinTech, there’s often a larger group involved, even if they’re not directly coding or designing. They still bring their expertise and perspective, making them an integral part of the team. Think of it as creating a stakeholder map to ensure you have all the necessary players on board. By doing so, you’ll have the right people to achieve your goals and create a successful outcome. [28:41] How do you measure team performance? Many teams are overworked with a long backlog, and it never seems to end. There is a constant flow of work to be done, so a lot of time this is a prioritization problem. This is not a team problem; it is a leadership problem. The lack of clear direction and focus from the top is to blame. It’s important to make trade-offs because even the greatest team cannot excel in all areas. To address this, we should adopt a straightforward prioritization framework. Start by considering the inputs that truly matter, whether they are related to the business, customers, revenue targets, or retention goals. The leadership team must align on what is truly important. Then, it’s crucial to make decisions and establish a filter for the product team to assess each piece of work. This filter will provide some guidance and direction. Although it’s important to note that no matrix or spreadsheet can provide an answer, they can provide directional indications of what is more important. Sometimes, you’ll need to make tough trade-offs and choose which tasks to prioritize. While it’s not an easy task, there are frameworks and strategies available to facilitate conversations about trade-offs. Working in partnership and fostering open dialogue is key. By aligning on what’s important and jointly making decisions, the product team can focus on the work that truly matters. The issues lie in the overwhelming workload rather than shortcomings of the team. It’s difficult to make a meaningful impact and succeed in such an environment when there is simply too much to handle. I have yet to come across a team that can thrive under such circumstances. Action Guide: Put the information Vidya shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links: Learn more about Product Rebels Check out Groundwork: Getting Better at Making Better Products Innovation Quote “There is no innovation and creativity without failure.” – Brené Brown 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 product managers can use AI to get more actionable insights from qualitative data Today we are talking about using qualitative data to drive our work in product and consequently improve sales. Joining us is Daniel Erickson, the Founder and CEO of  Viable, an AI analytics tool that enables businesses to instantly access and act on valuable insights from customer feedback, saving them hundreds of hours spent analyzing feedback. Before founding Viable, he held senior leadership roles in engineering, technology, and product. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:25] What is the qualitative data you have found useful for making product management decisions? When most people think about using qualitative data in product management, they think of surveys, user interviews, or getting reactions to a prototype. There’s a huge wealth of other qualitative data that often gets ignored by product teams because it is so hard to use—for example, customer support tickets, sales call transcripts, social media mentions, interview transcripts, and product reviews. Often somebody on the team is responsible for reading through all that stuff, synthesizing it into insights, and disseminating those insights across the team. This is a very manual process, so few teams decide to do the work. [4:22] What does that manual process typically look like? It starts with someone on the product team who says, “We need to know more about what our customers need from us.” Then the product leader goes to some poor associate PdM and asks them to collate all of the data together. This person goes to customer support and asks for raw data or asks what the customers are saying. The customer support person gives a response off the top of their head, which is biased and is not the big picture. Then the PdM or a person on the CX team reads through the data, puts it into Excel, and adds a column for bucketing to tag the data, e.g., “checkout” or “onboarding.” The PdM may do this for several data sets, such as NPS and sales calls. They tag each piece of data, find the biggest issue, synthesize the data, and write a paragraph about the issue. That report goes to the top-level leadership. This process takes a phenomenal amount of time, from 10-20 hours per week. You get analysis for only 5-20 buckets, and because those buckets are so broad, it’s hard to take action on that one-paragraph summary. Unless you spend hours going through every single data point, you’ll miss some nuance. It’s hard to get the fidelity of information you need to act on it. We found that artificial intelligence is starting to help companies make better product management decisions. Computers can go through the data in less time and in a more nuanced way. [12:53] How can we use AI for better qualitative data analysis? The first text analytics softwares could understand what is in a word cloud and identify parts of speech, but a word cloud doesn’t give you much other than some topics you might want to pay attention to. Sentiment charts also don’t show you how to take action. Over time, we have gotten more sophisticated tools to identify different topics. Now, transformer models allow computers to understand language itself. They’re no longer breaking apart parts of speech. They’re using statistics to predict what was meant. These tools are better at detecting sarcasm and agglomerating different wording about the same topic, for example it could group together “checkout” and “cart.” These tools are much more helpful in analyzing large amounts of text. Our AI analytics tool Viable provides analysis itself. Instead of just grouping things together and identifying themes, it analyzes these themes in the same way a qualitative analyst would. You interact with it by piping data in and asking questions. It produces reports based on the data. Each report identifies a ton of different themes and outputs a full analysis for each one that includes what people are talking about, why they are talking about it, who is talking about it, and what you should do about it. Instead of pumping out a dozen themes like you would in the manual process, Viable pumps out 120 themes that are each all much more actionable. [19:11] What examples do you have of using Viable to make better product decisions? We were working with an ecommerce company that ships custom-printed items to customers. They were receiving a lot of complaints about t-shirts arriving damaged. They piped the customer feedback in the form of support tickets into Viable, and we ran our analysis on it. We found close to 200 different themes and then searched through them to find the ones about t-shirts. We found the problem with the t-shirt quality was with the shipping not the manufacturing. They switched shipping providers. The next month, they ran the same report and the complaints about quality after shipping had decreased by 50%. You can use this data analysis for discovering issues and for validating whether or not your fix worked. [22:02] How can organizations automate this data analysis into their process? Eighty percent of data that is collected by companies is unstructured text like support tickets. This is data your company already has. The answers to your questions are already there. You pipe your feedback into one system that is your record for customer feedback. Our system produces weekly reports. We show how your complains have decreased or your compliments have increased, your top feature requests, and your top questions. Those rankings will change over time. It’s an awesome way to have a high-level view of your customer in your customer’s voice. All of our analysis comes with direct quotes from customers. We give recommendations for what you might want to do and raw text from customers. [26:23] You’ve commented before on the single most important question product managers can ask to determine whether they have nailed product market fit. What is that question? That question is “How disappointed would you be if you could no longer use this product?” If 40% or more of your respondents say they would be very disappointed, you likely already have product-market fit. Additionally, I suggest you ask three more questions: Who would get the biggest benefit from using this product? What benefit do you get from using this product? How can we improve this product for you? Make sure all those are open-ended text questions. You can use the answers to improve, and your score for the first question should start going up. As you understand the benefit you’re providing, you can hone in on that value proposition. As you understand who would be using your product, you can further target your audience down to just the people who are going to get the most benefit from your product. Action Guide: Put the information Daniel shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful link: Learn more about Viable Innovation Quote “The best way to predict the future is to create it.” – Alan Kay 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

Tips for creating customer use cases – for product managers Today we are talking about how to create and use customer use cases to guide product design.  Our guest is Dr. Lilac Muller, VP of Product Management at Kymeta Corporation. She oversees product strategy, definition, and launch activities for Kymeta’s mobile satellite communications product line, which is making mobile broadband connectivity around the world ubiquitous.  Lilac has over 20 years of product development experience in the telecommunications, consumer electronics, and medical devices industries where she has led cradle-to-grave product development efforts, and she holds 19 US patents. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [6:35] What is a customer use case? A use case is how customers use your product or service to derive value of some kind. That value makes the customer purchase the product and recommend it to their friends. How the customer uses the product drives the requirements we as product managers write for engineers to develop the product. Defining use cases has a few challenges. First, everybody thinks it is easy, but there’s a lot of nuance. Second, not all users are the same, so creating a common use case across a market segment or sub-segment is a lot harder than one thinks. The engineers can’t design to every possible use case. That creates complexity we are trying to avoid. We’re looking for simplicity, which is derived from a very clear use case defined by product management. [8:36] How do we create a customer use case? The use case starts from the business plan—the target market vertical that the product fits the best. Narrow down the scope to the type of customers you’re going after. Then learn about those customers. We have a habit of thinking we know the answer or asking our friends, who are in the same geography and socioeconomic standard as us. For use cases, you should broaden that. When I derive use cases, there are three ways that I pursue in parallel. First, I do internet research. YouTube videos of how to do things are a great forum. What people say and what they think are different, and what they think and what they do are different yet. So you need to observe people. Second, I interview customers. I go out into the field with customers and see what solutions they’re using today and what problems they’re facing. We put an MVP (minimum viable product) into the marketplace, learn, and refine the product. Third, I use customer surrogates. In an organization, there are people who touch customers on a regular basis, and they often know customers better than the customers know themselves. When I joined Kymeta, we had just launched our first-generation product called u7. It was a technological marvel. We sold it in the market place and started getting feedback. As the head of product management, I pulled all our customer-facing teams into a conference room. These are the customer surrogates. We had a session in which they told us what customers say, answering “What do you see? If you had a magic wand, what would you change?” I had everybody write 10 things on sticky notes, and then we bucketized them and talked about them. I can trace the origins of our current product to that session. [14:32] What are the differences between defining a use case for a product that is new to customers versus for a product that competitors already sell? The hardest use case to define is when you’re trying to invent a brand new category and your competition is non-use. You’re asking a consumer to change how they do something and use a solution the didn’t even realized they needed. To generate a use case, you can use rapid prototyping, nonfunction mockups, and storyboards. Put those in front of customers or customer surrogates without any supportive information and ask, “What would you do here? How would you use this? How do you feel about this? If you had a magic wand, what would you do?” Compile all of that information. Watch their body language and emotional response. Purchasing decisions are made on emotions, so getting to that emotional response is key in defining the use case you are going after. When you are developing a use case for an existing product, you need to present a your product as a better solution. Talk about how it will improve your customers’ lives and give them more value. The toughest thing to do is ask the right question. [18:41] How does the use case impact product vision and decision-making? The use case is like a magnifying glass that bring the product vision into focus. Product vision is high-level goals matched with market expectations and opportunity. The use case refines that vision and brings it into focus to a point where we can write clear requirements for the development team. It’s an iterative process because it may revise the vision depending on what we find out in investigating the use cases. [21:03] What format do you use for use cases? I define use cases in a number of different ways depending on the team. At Kymeta, we have written use cases. We have a clearly defined description for the engineering team that we supplement with white papers. We tell a short narrative in a couple of paragraphs, tie that into specific product requirements, and evolve into systems and technical requirements. [24:10] What are some other benefits of use cases? The use case provides focus for the whole organization. It forces us to focus on the right use cases and get data to validate internal assumptions. It forces the product team to do a normalization exercise—take pieces of data that may not all be consistent and create a unified use case. The use case ensures we’re focused on the right customer and the right segment, and we use it as a tool to write requirements for engineering. The use case is complementary to UI and UX activities. For example, at Kymeta when we developed the u8, we had some clear use cases at the beginning. When we launched the first variant, we brought in an independent third party to do a usability audit because we wanted a fresh set of eyes. They provided a report that we used to improve our product. [27:12] How do you validate information that goes into your use case? I validate it by talking with customers and working with customers. I also validate it with salespeople, support people and other functions within the organization. I ask customers and newbies. Sometimes I try to get a third party who isn’t from the industry to get me out of my box. What am I missing here? Action Guide: Put the information Lilac shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links: Learn more about Kymeta Connect with Lilac on LinkedIn Innovation Quote “You need to understand that informed intuition, rather than analytical reason, is the most trustworthy decision-making tool to use.” – Geoffrey Moore 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 product managers can gamify their products, process, and career I am interviewing speakers at my favorite annual conference for product managers, the PDMA Inspire Innovation Conference.  This discussion is with Mike Hyzy and Bret Wardle, whose session is titled “Level Up Your Product: Innovation with Game Mechanics.” In our competitive landscape, businesses constantly seek innovative ways to captivate users and empower their teams. Mike and Bret are sharing with us the power of gamification and its potential to revolutionize digital products and product management careers. Mike is a senior principal consultant at Daugherty Business Solutions. Previously he has been a product management consultant and has held senior product management roles. Bret is a product leader with 15 years of game and software management experience who advocates for the convergence of design psychology in games and software. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:13] What is gamification? Gamification is applying game concepts, mechanics, and psychology to anything outside of games, including careers, product, or life. [2:54] What’s an example of gamification? Board games are a perfect example. Storytelling emerges from playing board games. You go back years later and say, “Remember that time when we played Monopoly…” We can apply storytelling elsewhere and put it into products. There’s no reason why a spreadsheet can’t be shared in a story. Intricate game mechanics like getting points and unlocking levels help create a story and memorable experiences. [6:16] Why should product managers care about learning to use gamification? As we grow in our product management roles, we have to expand our toolboxes. Gamification is another tool to be innovative and enhance user experience, engagement, and retention. You don’t have the goal of doing gamification. You have a different goal—teaching users a new language, building a community of product managers, helping people hit their weight loss goals, etc. Gamification is a set of game mechanics and tools to help you get your user there. Gamification sometimes get a bad rap. Someone puts up a leaderboard and leaves it there for a year and then says, “Oh, gamification didn’t work.” There’s more to the mechanics of gamification than just putting up a leaderboard or giving points. There has to be a story behind it. There have to be fresh ideas—you never want to play the same level over. You can also gamify your product development process and make it more fun for your team. I started gamifying our retros. We did a Mario-Kart-themed retro and asked questions like, “What’s the shell that hit you? What’s the banana you slipped on? Why did you want that powerup?” It changed the conversation and energy within your group. [12:27] Tell us about gamifying your career. I made a list of skills and achievements, and every time I get a certification or a raise, those are like levels that I’m completing. As product people, we can create our own story. Let’s build levels into it, figure out where we’re getting points, and reward ourselves. [15:13] Are gamification and goal setting different? I think of them differently. The experience of writing a book over the last year has included secret levels I didn’t even know about like working with a publisher and creating a PR plan. Those weren’t goals—they were more challenges in the game. You can set goals, but when you gamify your product career, it’s just a more competitive mindset. Gamification also includes the idea that accomplishments earn rewards. [17:39] What are some examples of gamifying products? The mapping tool Waze treats traffic like a medieval dragon that users defeat together. Users generate maps that say where accidents, detours, and speed traps are. Users can see when they are passing another Waze user. There’s socialization and users can earn points and level up. Waze didn’t show people how to get from point A to point B—that already existed. They did it better, in a way that motivates people to use the app and provides loyalty. Their product encompasses storytelling and provides rewards as motivation. The American Red Cross blood donation app incentivizes users with points and rewards for donating blood. They give reminders when blood is needed and provide rewards like t-shirts. The photography competition app Guru Shots hosts themed competitions like best ancient buildings, flowers, or animals. You compete against others by submitting photos and voting on other photos. The more you vote, the more notoriety your photo gets. Photographers learn by doing and can join teams to socialize. [23:10] How does gamification create community? Some products naturally gravitate toward socialization, like social media. But anytime users are telling others about your product, that’s a social aspect. You can build that socialization into your product. A lot of SaaS providers give a month free if you refer a friend. Products can also include community by allowing people to cooperate or letting people join teams. Products can provide competitive challenges. Many fitness apps do this. There are many different types of social constructs you can design. As soon as you know what your goal for the product is, you can figure out the right game mechanics to use to accomplish that. Games started as a social aspect, but products usually start as tools to be used by individuals. Now, products are being engineered to be more social. [27:31] How have you gamified product processes? Post-launch, we use a game called Data Detective. Hopefully your software includes data tracking mechanisms. It’s not always easy to see trends. In this game, everyone is a detective and has one week to go through all the data and pitch what they found on Friday. You’re trying to solve the case of what happened to your product. Whoever comes up with the best verdict gets a reward. This doesn’t have to be monetary—it could be a police badge in this case. You can use leaderboards. Microsoft and Google allow their employees to submit ideas to a board give people a chance to pitch their ideas. Miro provides community-created content including templates for gamification. I found a gamified Star Wars retro and a themed design sprint. You can do themed icebreakers, especially for virtual meetings. I will put 20 GIFs on the screen and ask everyone to pick one and tell us why they feel that way. Action Guide: Put the information Mike and Bret shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links: Connect with Mike and Bret on LinkedIn Check out Gamification for Product Excellence: Level up your product success with higher user engagement, retention, and innovation Watch Bret’s TED Talk Innovation Quotes “Data doesn’t say things. Humans say things.” – unknown “The hardest thing is you have to say no 99 times and say yes once.” – Steve Jobs (paraphrased) 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 product managers can promote human-centered design I wonder if you can relate to this frustration—the pressure to get products and product updates released quickly sometimes means making compromises on design quality. It’s an organizational issue—moving quickly to beat competitors and keep up with changing customer preferences. Speed is more important than quality. Our guest, Debbie Levitt, renowned CX designer and author, recommends a different approach. When companies take the time to design products that match what the customer needs, profits soar, customer satisfaction (and retention) soars, and employee satisfaction gets a nice uptick too. Her book, Customers Know You Suck, address how to better understand, attract, and retain customers. We’ll discuss some practices that will help you be more successful with the products you work on. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:56] What is your perspective as a customer experience (CX) designer? My experience is in strategy, customer experience, and user experience. I’m focused on strategy and tactics that affect every touchpoint with customers. Sometimes when people hear design, they think making things pretty or deciding what color the button is, but I don’t have an artistic background. My background is about human behavior, psychology, and ethics. Customer experience design is human-centered design (HCD). Some people don’t know HCD has ISO standards. It is formalized and real. Human-centered design doesn’t really start with design. It starts with evidence, knowledge, and data. What do we know about people, systems, and contexts? If we don’t really understand our customers and the tasks they’re trying to accomplish, we’re unlikely to understand their problems and unlikely to solve their problems. HCD is making sure we’re customer-centric. [6:49] How is poor CX costly to an organization? There are always ways to be cheaper or faster, and we can pursue those if they match our company values, but there are many opportunities to have quality over speed. I know that scares people. It takes time and money, but the companies we admire most put in that time and money and we love them for it. [9:30] Where should we start with CX? Some companies already have UX researches who specialize in qualitative research. The try to get the best evidence, knowledge, and data to drive strategies, priorities, decisions, and products using qualitative data. The problem is we can run a survey that asks, “Are you sometimes thirsty and wish you could drink out of a cup?” And so many people say yes. Then we can all sit around a meeting table and say, “I think people need this cup idea that we have.” And then we release this giant one-liter cup the size of your head, and it’s not selling. We say, “We gave them the cup. What happened here?” That means we didn’t do the right research. We didn’t have our qualified specialists plan, execute, analyze, synthesize, and come up with actionable data to understand our users’ needs. It all comes down to tasks. Understand customers, what they do now, and ways they try to make it easier for themselves through workarounds and band-aids. Everything we notice in an observational study is an opportunity for our company to either adjust something small or to be disruptors and innovators. I’m not going to say you must be innovative and disruptive, but I will say you must be great. That’s what customers want from us more than anything. More than speed, they want the quality. [12:10] What other sources of data do you use? We use surveys, focus groups, NPS, customer support tickets, angry tweets, etc. Often these give us a clue of what could be going wrong, but we know customers are not great at understanding their own problems. These data sources are smoke that tell us there’s fire. Then we need research. I see too many teams and organizations say, “It would be great for our KPIs if customers clicked this button more.” They do a brainstorming workshop to figure out how to make customers click the button more. But they don’t know why they aren’t clicking the button, so they guess. I call this a guessing sandwich. We’re guessing why something is happening, what’s going to make it different or better, what the problem is, and what possible solutions might be best. Then we vote among ourselves on what solutions we like without going through a good human-centered design process to find the right one. Beware of guessing sandwiches. [16:17] Take us through how to talk to customers and do observational studies. You don’t have to know the right questions to ask because the right thing to do is to bring in a qualified professional. Another mistake I see people making is not doing research rigorously. We care about research rigor. You need to plan the study and figure out whom you’re going to talk to. Write scripts to use as a guide and ask spontaneous follow-up questions. Many people do not have a good interviewing style. They ask leading questions or the wrong questions. Then you need to do analysis and synthesis. We want to end up with actionable stuff, including problem statements, pain points, and needs. We want to fully understand the user and document that. We sometimes forget as product managers we don’t have to play every role. If you don’t know how to write Python to do a good data query, you’ve got data and analytics experts to rely on. Lean on a great CX researcher who knows the right questions to ask. We start with a collaborative kickoff process using a discovery phase knowledge quadrant. We all get together and talk about what we know and what information is missing. That way we don’t move forward on a project when we’re missing key information. [20:35] What are some practical problems product managers can run into when trying to work with CX? Often CX resources are small and less available, and product managers have to get special approval to talk to the CX team. The core of this is that the company didn’t hire enough of the right people. If there aren’t enough engineers for an important project, a company will get the budget to hire more engineers. But if there aren’t enough qualitative researchers, somebody will say, “This can’t be too hard. It’s just talking to people, right? I’ll go do it.” And now you have a problem. Solving this problem means hiring the right teams. It’s important to get budget for customer research. We know research is important and we’re already relying on it. Imagine if we did research more formally with people who were really amazing at it. When I worked in companies, I was assigned to three projects and spread very thing. Everybody on every team immediately hated me because I wasn’t fully available to them and they were waiting for me. If I were 100% allocated to one project, the team would be smiling. I recommend having one UX designer who is fully allocated to a project. Then get one full-time specialized researcher for the product team. That way you have someone working on design and someone working on evidence. One process for this is TriTrack Agile, which is three parallel streams of work: researchers, product managers who are research-informed, and the team bringing the product to delivery. I believe the best way to staff CX and UX teams is to have three full-time, fully allocated researchers plus two full-time, fully allocated designers. This provides redundancy and a full team working on UX, which makes us much faster. [25:56] What kind of projects need CX design? If you care about the customer experience, you need CX design. Often companies come up with reasons they don’t care, and I would still want to challenge that. Would it match our company values to not care about it? Does that fit with honesty, integrity, transparency, and empathy? It’s hard to inspire empathy in people. It’s become a buzzword, but people do care about the real experience someone is having, and that’s just sympathy. You can be genuinely sorry that a customer is having a bad experience with your system and want them to have a better one. That’s when we should be bringing in specialists who concentrate on CX. Even if you can get one dedicated researcher, that’s a great start. If you have a researcher who’s shared across teams, that’s also a start. Start anywhere because when researchers start to produce good stuff for one of the teams, the other teams will try to get more researchers. You can hire a senior leader researcher and a couple of junior researchers fairly inexpensively. Action Guide: Put the information Debbie shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links: Check out Customers Know You Suck Visit CustomerCentricity.com Check out the Customer Experience YouTube Channel Connect with Debbie on LinkedIn Innovation Quote Debbie was my first guest to refuse to share an innovation quote. Listen to the interview to find out why. 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

Matt Genovese, Founder and CEO at Planorama Design, discusses tips for selecting, planning, and prototyping product features. He highlights the challenges in hardware and software development and emphasizes starting small and using prototypes for validation. They also explore the pitfalls of an engineering-driven organization, the importance of user experience design, and the role of product managers in advocating for the right product and user experience. The chapter also touches on AI tools for product feature planning.

How product managers can use Adobe’s Kickbox innovation system Today we are talking about using the open source innovation system called Kickbox that was created at Adobe. This is a simple and effective tool for increasing innovation by orders of magnitude in an organization. Our guest is Ralph Hartmeier, co-founder and Chief Commercial Officer of rready, an organization that started from personal experience applying Kickbox, and which now helps other organizations unleash innovation. Ralph was introduced to Kickbox while he was head of growth for Swisscom. He is also a founding member of the non-profit Kickbox.org that promotes the use of Kickbox. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:50] What was going on at Adobe that led to Kickbox? Around 2013, a serial entrepreneur named Mark Randall sold his startup to Adobe and joined Adobe. He realized innovation in a big corporation such as Adobe looks very different from innovation in a startup. He was given the title VP of Creativity and given as much budget as he needed in order to change Adobe’s cumbersome innovation process. He realized that coming up with ideas was rather easy for certain employees but submitting ideas into an idea management system and validating ideas were not easy. He helped these innovators with a gamified, fun approach to go from raw idea to a validated idea. He put an innovation process guide in a red box called Kickbox and started distributing it to people within Adobe. [5:17] What else is in the box? The most important part is the guide to the innovation process. There is a credit card with $1000 on it. An employee can spend that on whatever they think is necessary to bring the idea forward. They also need to prove what they have done and how they have progressed. There is a notebook labeled “Bad Ideas” to help create a culture of innovation. It’s important to spread the message that not every idea is good and not every idea needs to be good. You need quite a few bad ideas in order to hit a good one. There is a chocolate bar and a Starbucks card. The whole box told a story. Mark Randall gathered 20-30 employees, handed out boxes, and told the story, which was highly inspirational. People started validating their ideas. Adobe made sure to capture the learnings and made sure people are being held accountable. [9:41] What philosophy does the Kickbox promote? Perhaps a company could fund 10 projects with $1 million per year, or they could fund 1000 projects with $1000, and they only need one of them to win for the whole program to pay for itself. Plus 1000 employees learn how to innovate. If a management board chooses 10 ideas in early-stage innovation, that’s a game of luck. Kickbox finds people who want to go the extra mile—working hard, being patient, and iterating their ideas. You should test a lot of ideas with a little money. Let people learn what it takes to validate an idea. Then you will be quite sure you will be able to implement one idea or another and scale it and turn it into a growth machine. We step away from corporate innovation being a game of luck to knowing exactly how many ideas we need to source in the beginning of the year to hit two, three, or four projects being implemented and scaled. [11:32] What is the $1000 credit card intended to be used for? Mark Randall said, “I don’t care.” You use it for whatever you think is right. When we applied the Kickbox idea to the company here in Switzerland, we realized this is very gray from a compliance perspective. We needed to put another system in place, but we didn’t want to lose the mindset that you’re the CEO of your idea. We realized the kickboxers might not know many people within the organization. They might not know how to access somebody who can help them with a prototype. We got rid of the prepaid credit card and use a digital currency. You get a thousand coins and can spend them to bring in people to help—designers, lawyers, etc. That was very successful because it’s super easy to deploy and the entrepreneurs are still in the driver’s seat. We also made it easy for them to connect with others inside the organization who could help. [16:44] How are companies using the Kickbox system today and how is rready helping? Typically the Kickbox system is positioned within the innovation department, but it’s optimal if we have strong support from HR. We try to understand the definition of innovation in each company. A few companies want to create the next big thing, but others just want to be better at executing cost savings. In any case, Kickbox is a gamified, fun way to communicate within the company. It shouldn’t be perceived as just another tool coming from management. [18:46] What is the timeline for using the red box? The typical timeframe is two months. We realized if we just distribute boxes few people come back. After two months, you have to come back and either pitch why you want to move on to the second phase or pitch what you learned and why you don’t want to move on. It’s super important for corporate to capture these learnings. When you open the box, there is now a video talking to you. The first thing you do is figure out your motivation to be an entrepreneur. It’s going to be hard, so we want to know why entrepreneurs are doing this. Then you understand and investigate the problem. We’re aiming for problem-solution fit. The entrepreneur needs to describe the problem and then do problem validation, including discussing with experts. They try to figure out how many people have this problem and how much they would pay to fix it. The method in our head is Lean startup and human-centered design thinking, but we try to simplify it to help innovators go step-by-step toward the final pitch. The pitch should be a data-backed problem-solution pitch, which makes it much easier for management to decide which ideas to focus on and push into the second phase, the blue box. [22:58] What are those decision gates like? We use a decentralized approach. When employees validate an idea, they can already pinpoint possible sponsors in the corporation. They bring the sponsor data. They provide a certain desirability and describe their biggest unknowns. If the sponsor is convinced, the entrepreneur gets a blue box and after another decision gate a gold box. [26:10] What benefits have you seen from the Kickbox system? The first benefit is a huge motivational booth among the employees. You will see a lot of talent popping up where you did not imagine there was talent. Employees get to be directly part of being innovative. Companies can present a topic like sustainability and have employees bring ideas related to that topic. We see effects on cost savings and new turnover. [29:26] How have Swisscom and rready enhanced Kickbox? Rready developed out of Swisscom, the largest telco and IT company of Switzerland. We were given the task to bring in external startups, but we realized we first needed to set a culture of innovation within the company. We met Mark Randall and brought the Adobe Kickbox into our company. We realized we needed to develop it further for our needs. We built a software that lets entrepreneurs reach out to experts internally and book service providers, and it makes everything measurable. We had huge success within Swisscom and then decided to formulate a spin-out that would be useful for other corporations too. Now we support the deployment of Kickbox in other companies, providing the methodology and software. We have created a community of 45 companies that can learn from each other. We open source the progress methodology from Adobe. Action Guide: Put the information Ralph shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links: Connect with Ralph on LinkedIn Learn more about Kickbox Learn more about rready Innovation Quote “I know quite certainly that I myself have no special talent. Curiosity, obsession, and dogged endurance combined with self-criticism have brought me to my ideas.” – Albert Einstein  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

In this episode, Eli Packouz, serial inventor and two-time founder, discusses the journey of bringing his revolutionary flossing product, Instafloss, to market. He shares insights on the challenges of flossing, the reasons people don't floss, and existing flossing solutions. Eli also talks about the iterative product development process, including prototyping and testing with flossing pigs. The episode explores the stages of developing a disruptive innovation and offers lessons on product development and overcoming challenges.