Product Mastery Now for Product Managers, Leaders, and Innovators

Former Head of Talent for tech companies turned Job Search Strategist, Erika Klics, shares common mistakes product leaders make when trying to get a job. She emphasizes the importance of relevant experience and building trust in the interview process. Erika also discusses the significance of receiving feedback after job interviews and suggests treating interviews as conversations. The chapter on researching before a product job interview highlights the importance of gathering information about the company's focus, job descriptions, and team by connecting with people on LinkedIn.

Tami Reiss, an experienced product executive, discusses how product leaders can increase team performance. She emphasizes the importance of fostering connection and empathy within the team and with other stakeholders. Building relationships with internal functions and team members is crucial. Profitability and connecting product metrics to business metrics are highlighted as key factors for overall business growth.

Bob Caporale, strategic practitioner with 20 years experience leading product, marketing, and business functions, discusses creating a product strategy. Product managers need to break down company objectives to impact the product. Bob emphasizes the importance of looking beyond the product roadmap and involving senior leadership in strategy development. Refreshing the strategy regularly and avoiding blindly copying competitors are key challenges for product people.

Atif Rafiq, who invented a problem-solving system, shares a three-part framework for faster problem-solving: Exploration, Alignment, and Decision-Making. He discusses the need for purposeful innovation in organizations, the importance of getting buy-in and stakeholder alignment, and the value of exploration and shared understanding in decision-making.

Jonas Klink, Vice President of Product Management & UX Design at Thrive Market, discusses the mission-driven product process. Thrive Market aims to make healthy and sustainable living easy and affordable. They curate a selection of high-quality, non-GMO, and organic products. Klink shares the importance of aligning the organizational mission with product vision and using OKRs to measure progress. He also emphasizes continuous learning and agile thinking in product management.

Ben Foster, Co-Founder and Executive Chairman at Prodify, shares advice on solving common dysfunctions in product management. He discusses challenges in direction, people, and process, emphasizing the need for alignment between product strategy and organizational strategy. He also highlights the importance of effective communication, clear vision, and hiring and organizing teams based on growth stage. The concept of Conway's Law and its implications in product design are also explored.

The value the Product Development and Management Association provides for product mangers and leaders Today we are talking about the most influential professional product association you’ve likely never heard of. The association is PDMA, and we’ll talk about what the they do and why you should know about them. Susan Penta is with us. She is the Chair of PDMA and has served in other volunteer roles with the association in the past. She is also the co-founder and managing partner at MIDIOR, which has been providing professional services for 26 years to product organizations in a number of areas from product insights, product development and management, and technology platforms. It’s worth noting that PDMA is a volunteer-led organization and, like Susan, most of the people involved in its leadership have fulltime jobs in product roles yet make time to contribute to the professional association.  On and off, I’ve been one of those contributors as well because PDMA has been vital in my career development and I want to help other product managers. I’m currently serving PDMA by being an author on the 3rd edition of their body of knowledge for product innovation, which Wiley is publishing in early 2024. This episode is sponsored by PDMA so we can find out more about the association. Register for PDMA’s 2023 Inspire Innovation Conference on September 16th-19th in New Orleans, LA, USA.   Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:15] What is PDMA? PDMA is the Product Development and Management Association. We exist to advance and nurture the discipline of innovation, product development, and product management. We do that through academic research, academic-focused professional development, education, certification, and community. We were founded in 1976 by a group of individuals who at that point powered some of the most respected, recognized, and innovative companies. Today we are still doing that, and we are one of the only associations, if not the only professional association, to bring together academics, practitioners, and service providers around the discipline of product management to advance the discipline. [4:13] Why is PDMA not better known among product managers and leaders? You can talk about it as a marketing problem, but I think there is some root cause in our mission. Because we are about nurturing the discipline of product management itself, PDMA isn’t the place where individuals who work in product roles come to get jobs. Because our focus is on thought leadership and often the kind of content we bring to the table is heavy—academic or at least well researched and thought through—we are for those who are not faint of heart when it comes to product development and management. For many individuals who work in product management and product development roles, the discipline is a stop on their career path, so they don’t necessarily get jazzed about the discipline itself. Our work in our communities is through our chapters. We are not putting commercialized content out there. We don’t have a big marketing engine. While we are a global organization, our grassroots are in each individual location where our chapters are. We should be better known, and organizations trying to professionalize the discipline of product development and product management inside their company give our certification visibility, but many people in small to medium businesses might not engage with PDMA unless they come across a chapter or our journal or somebody like Chad or me. [12:47] What value have you found by being a PDMA member? I fancy myself a lifelong learner. I care about nurturing the discipline of product management and development. In PDMA, you’re always learning. It’s fascinating to hear how other industries deal with product development, product management, organizations, process, and so forth. PDMA provided me with colleagues and an opportunity to look through many different lenses. Because I was starting to teach and the individuals in my classes were from different industries, that ended up being super valuable. It kept me at the forefront of where the research was headed because a big piece of our organization is focused on academics and research for the future. The PDMA Body of Knowledge is synonymous with entrepreneurship and how you think about starting a company. A startup is a single-product company. The Body of Knowledge chronicles the product journey from cradle to grave. Even if you are focused on research and development, or if you’re focused on product marketing—two different ends of the life cycle—the Body of Knowledge gives you the entire context. It makes you a better individual, a better leader, and more appreciative of what other teams are doing. We have a body of work that is highly relevant to many. [18:22] What are some other reasons product managers and leaders should know about PDMA? First, if you think you’re going to stay in and around product, and especially if you want to lead product teams of any type, then knowing about PDMA and leveraging the professional development, Body of Knowledge, and opportunities that we present to learn and engage with others ends up being pretty powerful. PDMA cuts across career journeys and industries. If you want to stay in product or you want to be a leader, we would be an organization that you want to at least know about, if not engage with. Second, we’re a serious group. We’re credible. The things that we put out are evidence-based and research-based. If you’re a product person—truly through your core—you go to PDMA. If you are interested in finding a job, PDMA is an interesting place for that, but we don’t have the biggest job board for product managers because that’s not our focus. We can refer to you to other places. We care about the discipline. We care about the way in which individuals are able to interact with the discipline and with their teams and put really great, relevant products into market. That’s who we are. [22:26] Tell us about the annual conference and how to register. Every year PDMA puts on an annual research forum and practitioner conference, which are part of the same event. You don’t have to go to the academic conference if you’re a practitioner, and you don’t have to go to the practitioner conference if you are an academic, but they are both together, representative of who we are as PDMA. This year’s conference is in New Orleans from September 16th-19th. It’s called the 2023 Inspire Innovation Conference. This year we will start with a research forum on Saturday into Sunday, have a bridge session Sunday afternoon, and then go into our practitioner conference on Monday into early Tuesday. I’ve never been disappointed at any point in my career in a PDMA conference. I am, as I said, a lifelong learner. I go to the conference to learn and connect with others. The content is amazing, and it’s very egalitarian, so you can be three years into your career talking to somebody who’s a Chief Product officer or a CEO. The tie that binds everyone together is an interest in the discipline. We’re interested in product development, product management, and innovation, and there are a plethora of opportunities to go explore whatever want to you want to learn about. I think we do a great job in a short period of time. We try to provide opportunities for the entire group to come together. This conference is attended by hundreds of people. We have sessions together and separate tracks. Additionally, I own a professional services firm, so for my team, especially for those individuals who are earlier in their career, coming to a PDMA conference is a great way to consume a lot of material and do some professional development around the things that our clients care about. You can register at PDMA.org. Right now there is early-bird pricing (until August 10th). Put the information Susan shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links: Register for the 2023 Inspire Innovation Conference and get early-bird pricing until August 10th Check out PDMA.org Innovation Quote “Invention is a flower. Innovation is a weed.” – Bob Metcalfe 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

Colin Bryar, a former Amazon employee, discusses the 'working backwards' approach to product. They talk about the origin of the approach, using the FACU format for business case discussions, applying it to product projects, uncovering the truth about ideas, and making innovation a full-time job.

How product managers can create a portfolio and manage innovation Today we are talking about portfolio management—creating a portfolio, adjusting it, selecting projects for it, and managing innovation. Our guest is Gareth Bradley, Director of Product Management at Planview. Planview is a leading provider of product portfolio management solutions. Previous to Planview, Gareth held Product VP roles and managed innovation portfolios. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [1:42] What is a product portfolio and why do we care about it? Product portfolios allow companies with multiple products to align work tracks around particular products. Companies organize their product portfolios either at the product level or around groups of products or services. [3:12] What are some ways organizations structure portfolios? There are two worlds. The traditional world is where the structure of portfolios is around projects—how a work item starts, is worked upon, and is delivered to the market. These projects run in groups called the portfolio. Each project has a start date and end date. The traditional view is prevalent, but we’ve observed a shift from a project mindset to a product mindset. In the product mindset, work is more continuous. You work in the product development lifecycle, thinking about a continuous evolution of a product or service that goes into market. The way your portfolio is structured needs to adapt for new innovations. The product mindset is the new frontier. One of the biggest challenges for many organizations is striking the balance between a project- and product-oriented mindset. They may have been working in the project mindset for a long time. Now because of disruption in the market, they have to shift the way they think, and that’s tough to do. [6:29] What are some example of project-driven and product-driven portfolios? Organizations delivering smart-connected products have had to make the jump to product-driven portfolios. When you’re manufacturing a physical thing, you work on one version and it’s complete. The development cycle is long. As more companies are dealing in software, the product mindset comes in. You cluster work to support the overall family group. For example, automotive entertainment requires a lot of software for a vehicle. There’s a family of supporting projects for that vehicle. Once the vehicle is out, there’s continual work on the software. As my CEO says, “Good software is not like fine wine. It’s more like sushi. It doesn’t get better with age.” As an organization, you have to think about how you can maintain your position in the market. Think about the structure of getting the product out to market and balancing the portfolio to manage the whole lifecycle. [10:03] How do you use buckets or horizons in portfolio management? The three horizons approach is dividing work into short, medium, and long term. Some companies organize their portfolios to keep each horizon contained. In other organizations, like those spending a lot on R&D for medical devices, horizons one and two can become more muddled so you have incremental innovation to support the product that has gone to market. Other organizations are purely doing R&D innovation. They work in horizon three. [23:27] Where do innovation ideas enter the portfolio? Start with the end in mind—what do we want to put into market? Organizations that win at this game are the ones who think about the end in mind, predominantly around funding—how do we fund innovation in and around our portfolios? Organize crowd structure into three buckets: incremental, disruptive, and breakthrough. (The crowd is employees, supply chain, partners, and customers—anyone you collaborate with.) There is a middle space before the portfolio, an incubation area where you select 10-20 ideas from a thousand. The incubation area can be where pre-funding happens and where market fit is thought about. If you don’t do that middles step or if you don’t execute it well, you end up with a lot of good ideas but you can’t execute them. I’ve worked with engineering companies who do this very well. They know what type of innovation they’re looking for and will line up the end with the start. In the incubation process, they make sure those ideas are viable. As a project manager, you need to be in touch with the portfolio people to understand what kind of projects they have funding for. As a product leader or product VP, you would want your portfolio to have funding allocated for receiving new ideas. [30:36] What are some indications we need to rethink how we’re allocating our resources in our portfolio? I look at throughput. What are we getting out into market? Are we finishing things on time as predicted on budget with the resources we have? We look at the whole lifecycle. What is happening in the market with what we already delivered? What are customers telling you? Bring in complaint data and align spending with fixing bugs or issues that generate customer attrition. Action Guide: Put the information Gareth shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links: Connect with Gareth on LinkedIn or Twitter Learn more about Planview Innovation Quote “Under the right circumstances, groups are remarkably intelligent, and are often smarter than the smartest people in them.” – James Surowiecki 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

Lessons from the discoverer of Stage-Gate for product managers Today we are talking with a legend in product management. Our guest is Dr. Robert Cooper, who discovered the now famous Stage-Gate process and was named the “World’s Top Innovation Management Scholar” by the prestigious Journal of Product Innovation Management. Besides his best-selling books Winning at New Products and Portfolio Management for New Products, he has published more than 130 articles on R&D and innovation management. He is frequently helping organizations succeed while also holding the role of Professor Emeritus at McMaster University and Distinguished Research Fellow at Penn State University. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [3:05] What key challenges are medium and large organizations encountering today when trying to get new products into the marketplace? We’re facing new uncertainty and risks. Companies have to think about what to do short-term to keep the lights on and what to do long-term for bolder innovations. Some companies will retreat and cut their spending by cutting bolder long-term innovations, and we saw in the recession around 2010 that was a bad strategy. In some mature industries, it is increasingly difficult to find opportunities for new products. In the 1920s and 1930s, there was no absence of problems in telecommunications. They couldn’t even send a long-distance call because there were no amplifiers, no vacuum tubes, and no transistors. They had to invent all those things. When you have no absence of customer or user problems, if you’re reasonably intelligent, you can usually come up with the inventions and the necessary breakthrough new products. Today it’s harder in the telecommunications business because there are problems but not as evident as formerly. Other industries like IT are still going strong with many opportunities and problems to solve, but it’s becoming increasingly tougher to find fantastic voids in the marketplace. Another challenge is fortitude of the general manager to keep spending at the same level when it is tougher and tougher to get the return on investment you need. On the other hand, there are all kinds of new technologies like AI, biosciences, and new opportunities in the medical field. These technological possibilities should generate all kinds of new product opportunities. [7:38] What advice do you give leaders about making strategic decisions? There are many risks and uncertainties like the supply chain, market size, and expected profitability. The numbers we put in our business cases are notoriously wrong often by a factor of two. Many business cases are fantasy because there are so many unknowns, which people usually don’t factor in. Take a hard look at how you do your business case in light of increasing uncertainties and build that in somehow. I have a new article coming out on expected commercial value, which builds likelihoods into the business case. How do you estimate likelihoods? We didn’t know how to do it in the past, but now we have estimates from companies like Dow Chemical and 3M. They have put together probability tables that give the likelihood of success under certain circumstances, because they’ve studied enough projects to know. Do the net present value calculations with correction factors for likelihood of success. The other piece of advice is getting the product right. Sometimes people do voice-of-customer analysis and think they understand the customer’s needs, then spend a year designing a prototype, then do field trials and everything goes wrong. The customer’s needs have changed or the customers didn’t understand their own needs. Instead, we recommend iterative innovation. Build something really fast and demo it to the customer to get instant feedback. Get the product out in their face fast, early, often, and cheap. The first version doesn’t have to be the real product. You can create a computer simulation or animation. Show the customer something in the first three weeks of development and repeat every four weeks. Demo to management too because you need their buy-in and support. [13:07] What’s an example of using iterative innovation? Steve Jobs said, “Customers don’t know what they want until they see it.” LEGO has a B2B business called LEGO Education, which sells learning products to schools and teachers. It’s a combination of IT software and LEGO blocks. There was a new product coming out that LEGO had been working on for about four years and couldn’t get right. It was a creative writing curriculum to teach younger children how to be more creative writers. LEGO had several panels of teachers, and they asked them, “What are you looking for in this product?” And the teachers weren’t sure. One of the teachers finally said, “Why don’t you build something and show it to us? And then we’ll tell you if it’s right.” The team got into iterative development or Agile Stage Gate, and it worked very well. [17:46] What do organizations need to rethink about portfolio management? One of the major challenges is having too many projects in the pipeline for available resources. Nobody has the fortitude to say no, so the default option is to do them all. By doing them all, we guarantee they’re all late. When you do a portfolio review and re-rank all the projects, you find out that a few of them that look shiny and bright at the beginning are not quite so shiny and bright over time. Maybe it is time for a tough re-review of the entire set of projects to kill some of them to benefit the whole portfolio. You can rank the projects from 1 to 15, lop off the bottom 5, and reallocate the resources to the top 10, but who has the guts to do that? You’re going to be annoying or discouraging somebody. But let’s face it, some projects are the bottom third and maybe their resources are better spend on the the top two thirds. You have to have buckets and rank each bucket separately because you can’t compare minor modifications and bold innovations. Someone has to have the method and the guts to do this re-ranking and get top management on board. Those meetings are pretty tough, especially the first one, but it has got to be done. Otherwise your projects are going to be late or under-resourced, and success rates will go down. Use a good method for ranking projects. Have a tough portfolio manager. Have a good data system. Often, when projects go through gates or portfolio review, the only criteria for go are “Is it on schedule?” and “Is it on budget?” Those are the the wrong questions. They’re backward-looking questions. Instead, ask forward-looking questions like, “Does this project still offer great value to the company?” and “What’s the financial value going forward?” Net present value and productivity index are good metrics for that. [22:55] What bucket approach do you use? The first key step is knowing where your money and resources are going now. Make a pie chart of the breakdown across the buckets by numbers of projects, a second pie chart of where the resources are going, and a third pie chart of first-year sales for new projects. Often, you might find that where the sales are coming from is not where the resources are going. You might be putting most of your seed on the worst fields. [28:03] What do people misunderstand about Stage-Gate that you would like them to know? The Stage-Gate process came from stories of successful entrepreneurs and teams. These projects had bold and assertive project leaders and teams that did everything right and had huge successes. Today companies have lost that entrepreneurial risk-taking approach. They’ve burdened their Stage-Gate process with too much paperwork and check-the-box exercises. Get rid of non-value-added work. Apply Lean principles. Map out your process beginning-to-end on a big roll of paper or post-it-notes. Get rid of all the unnecessary stuff. It only takes about a day to do that exercise and then a little longer to improve the process. Before you get into Agile, get your process working right. Action Guide: Put the information Bob shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links: Visit Bob’s website Check out the PDMA Handbook 4th edition Innovation Quote “There are two ways to win at new products. The first way is ‘doing projects right’—and that’s what Stage-Gate is all about—a stage-by-stage process to drive new products to market effectively. The second way is ‘doing the right projects’—and that’s about project selection, making the right investment decisions, and portfolio management. The problem here is that management’s batting average is worse than the toss of a coin—only 25% percent of projects approved for development become commercial successes! Let’s see how to do both ways to win better.” – Bob Cooper 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