Product Mastery Now for Product Managers, Leaders, and Innovators

How product management teams can better make decisions Today we are talking about disruptions that impact our product work. Whether it’s supply chain disruptions, the great resignation, AI impacts, market competition or something else, continued disruption is expected. How can we navigate such an environment?  To help us make decisions in this environment, Alexis Gonzales-Black joins us. She is an organization design expert and author, with experience in organization design, transformation, and team leadership. She is currently leading organization design at August Public and previously at IDEO, Zappos, and other organizations. She also authored The New School Rules: 6 Vital Practices for Thriving and Responsive Schools. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:13] What does an organization designer do? We look at the factors of an organization like purpose, strategy, structure, process, systems, talent, and incentives. We make sure those factors are accelerating the organization toward its ultimate outcome— its mission and vision. The cycle of disruption is so fast that it consistently pulls our structure and processes away from what we are trying to achieve. We need an ongoing awareness of sensing and adapting to change at all levels. [4:35] Tell us about your framework for making decisions in turbulent environments. First I want to talk about “Why decision making?” Why do we use that as a way to talk to companies and product teams? No matter where we go in any organization, folks have feedback about how decisions are being made. Typically, there’s a lot of dissatisfaction with the way decisions are made in organizations. Decision making is a great proxy for many other factors in an organization, like trust, empowerment, psychological safety, speed, efficiency, power, and authority. We often use decision making as a concrete way to improve and accelerate teams because it brings in so many different factors of how teams work together. When we look across all of the research about decision making, we see that three common levers emerge: Clear decision ownership Explicit decision process Decision capture [6:49] Clear decision ownership The most ubiquitous decision ownership tool is RACI. It falls hopelessly short of providing the type of clarity that we want it to provide. We end up just documenting the dysfunction of our teams rather than providing clarity about how the decision is made. We like to introduce single decision ownership. That doesn’t mean that person is making an autocratic decision, but it means you have one decision owner. Who is responsible for shepherding the decision process, for getting the inputs and ultimately making the final call? That level of clarity helps accelerate teams. We encourage folks to consider who is closest to the work, has expertise, and is closest to the data. A lot of folks default to consensus as the model for decision making because they’re afraid of being responsible if something unforeseen happens. Consensus is overused and misused. It is preferable is for one person to make a decision using the information they have at the time and to have an environment where it’s okay to say, “Oh, maybe that’s not what I would’ve done, but I trust you,” or “Maybe it didn’t turn out the way that we wanted it to, but let’s just learn and pivot moving forward.” [10:04] What tools do you use for clear decision ownership? Select the best decision owner for each decision. We use a proposal where somebody on the team says, “You know what? I think Chad is closest to this information. He’s been working on this project and driving this forward. I propose that Chad is the decision owner.” Have a quick moment to see if there are any objections. As long as we agree that Chad is going to make sure that his stakeholders are heard and considered, we consent to Chad being the decision owner. Then we do a really rigorous stakeholder map where the decision owner names his key stakeholders—the people he needs to keep in the loop and who will impacted by the decision. He doesn’t necessarily invite them into the decision-making moment, but he gets their input. The decision maker has to make a great stakeholder map, engage us appropriately, get our data, and make sure that the decision is considering the most relevant data. [11:58] Explicit decision process We use a disagree-and-commit process, where you detail the steps of a decision-making process. The first step is a proposal. The second step is an opportunity for the stakeholders to ask clarifying questions. Often we jump right into reactions, but we need to understand and clarify before we get into our opinions. After we’ve clarified, we’ll have a round of advice or reactions where each person, one at a time without interruption, gets to say their advice. Then we will end the decision-making moment with an objection round, during which people say whether they have any data that this is unsafe to try. They put that dissent on the table, and we validate whether or not it is valid data. Then we leave that one-hour meeting having made a decision. [18:36] How do we define the decision we’re making? Before you name an owner or get into the decision making process, you must define the decision. Often, the decision we’re trying to make is a symptom of a bigger decision or we haven’t quite thought about the thing we need to be answering here. We have a tendency to bundle decisions together and to try to make many decisions all at the same time. W need to first do some unbundling and look at the bigger picture to defining the parameters of the decision before we even get into the process. [21:36] Decision capture If it’s not written down, it isn’t decided. We use a shared document, in a shared space, in a shared log to write down the decision that was made. If you can, include context around that decision, other alternatives, trade-offs, and stakeholders. A lot of teams use a simple template with five prompts: What decision was made? Who was there? What considerations? What trade-offs? When will we revisit this decision? [25:05] What AI-driven tools help with capturing decisions? Many new AI technologies like Otter or Fireflies that can record a conversation, summarize that conversation into its main themes and insights, and read out that summary at a high level. There are tools for asynchronous decision making like Murmur and Hoop where you can input a proposal and it will move the proposal through a bunch of stage gates, where everybody on the team can write their questions and objections. Everything is documented in a decision making blog. [26:53] Is there an example you can share of how an organization applied this framework? I was working with the CEO of a large software company who was extremely confident in his decision making and not somebody who shies away from bold decisions. We used an explicit process with the CEO’s staff. The CEO made a proposal, we had time for clarifying questions, and then we almost painstakingly went around person-by-person for the members of his C-staff to share their advice and reactions. It’s such a subtle but profound shift from what we’re used to, which is loudest voices in the room dominating everybody. It shifted the energy in the room to quiet contemplation. The CEO was having to listen intently to what each person said in turn, without being able to react or respond. At the end of that meeting, the CEO said, “Not only did I make a different decision, but I heard from members of my CEO staff whom I would never typically hear from.” We considered that a huge win for that team, not just in the inclusion of voices but also in the quality of data that he was able to use to improve his decision by simply using an explicit process. Action Guide: Put the information Alexis shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links: Connect with Alexis on LinkedIn Learn more about August Public for Organization Change Innovation Quote “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms or books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.” – Rainer Maria Rilke in Letters to a Young Poet  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 established organizations can overcome barriers to digital transformation – for product managers Today we are exploring digital transformation in large organizations as well as other challenges leaders are facing in a digitally transforming business environment. With us is David Rogers, an expert on digital transformation, a member of the faculty at Columbia Business School, and the author of five books, including The Digital Transformation Roadmap. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [1:38] What kind of problems are executives of organizations talking about now? There’s a tension between the external and the internal. Established organizations are seeing a lot of external change—new technologies, new behaviors among customers and employees, and digital change. The pace at which each new wave of change comes is speeding up. On the other side, businesses find it hard to adapt internally to respond to change. Many companies are working on digital transformation, but they’re struggling to see results. Seventy percent of large organizations are failing in their efforts to transform. I’ve been diving into the key problems that are holding organizations back from digital transformation. They understand the urgency to transform, but inertia is holding them back. [5:43] What is digital transformation? Digital transformation is the transformation of an established business to thrive in a digital age of constant change. This is about established businesses. Creating a new startup is a different challenge. In an established business, you have a business model, customers, ecosystem of partners and distribution channels, employees, and a brand reputation. The challenge is adaptation. How do we turn a giant battleship in the water? Digital transformation is not, at its heart, about technology. We need to change because of changes around us, which are driven by new technologies, but to change our organization, we have to focus much less on the technology and much more on the customer and our own business. To respond when things seem to be changing so fast, keep an eye on the technology, but don’t lose sight of your real mandate, which is to solve customer problems, solve business problems, and pursue opportunities for sustainable growth. [7:36] What part does artificial intelligence (AI) play in digital transformation? The current wave of change is around generative AI. A lot of companies are pumping out demos of AI passing the bar exam or creating a marketing plan in 30 seconds. It’s uncanny how an algorithm can put things together that are shockingly similar to what a person might write. Is it actually useful though? Most of the examples I see are not useful. The marketing plan created in 30 seconds is not good enough to implement. It’s a B-minus student’s effort. Other people are using AI to actually solve problems. Khan Academy is using large language models to provide one-on-one tutoring. There is a lot of evidence that learners perform and progress better and faster if they have one-on-one tutoring, but human tutors aren’t scalable. Khan Academy is building an incredible application to provide tutoring that is as good as or even better than what a human tutor can provide. We have to follow and track these fast-moving changes, but we cannot be distracted by them from the strategic question, “What problems are we trying to solve?” [10:51] Tell us about your framework for digital transformation. My framework address five barriers to digital transformation: Lack of shared vision: A lot of companies have a generic intent to become more digital or futureproof the business, but those phrases are meaningless and generic, as opposed to a vision that is specific to the company. Where do we see our world, context, customers, and industry going? What is the role that we see ourselves in, in this rapidly evolving future around our particular organization? Your vision must be rooted in your particular business and unique capabilities. Lack of clear growth priorities: Sometimes a company has no focused strategic process at all and is chasing after the latest shiny object. Other companies are purely looking at cost savings and efficiency, which is important, but if all you’re trying to do is optimize your longstanding business, you’re going to miss out on the biggest growth upside. Focus on planning instead of experimentation: Product management is all about iteratively learning through experimenting and getting customer feedback. Some companies lack that process and rely on detailed, traditional planning processes based on third-party data. Lack of flexibility in governance: If you have no flexibility built into governance processes, such as allocating resources and starting and stopping projects, you will have an inability to effectively scale good ideas. Lack of change in capabilities: Your technology stack may not have been brought up to the present era. You may have an inflexible structure. Your people may not have the relevant skills to pursue the ideas your product managers have identified as problems to solve. Or the culture of the organization may not have moved forward. [19:43] Can you take us through an example of an organization that went through digital transformation? Walmart has gone through digital transformation while going into ecommerce. Walmart has done a really good job of clearly defining problems to be solved. They’ve tested and learned which of their solutions or growth ideas are working and have not been afraid to shut down ones that aren’t and scale up ones that are. One of their biggest growth opportunities is ecommerce or omnichannel commerce around groceries. Walmart understood they weren’t going to beat Amazon at its own game, but they have certain strengths—namely, physical stores. They looked for strategies that made their physical stores assets rather than liabilities. They created many pilots of different approaches for grocery delivery—drop off, pick up, and shipping. Ninety percent of Americans live within 10 miles of a Walmart, so the proximity of the stores is a tremendous strategic asset. They tried a lot of things and figured out what was working then built on that. Walmart’s buy-online, pick-up-at-store model, which was already growing before the pandemic, became supercharged during the pandemic. People felt secure and safe getting groceries loaded into their trunks without even having to roll down the window. Walmart tried a text-messaged-based commerce concierge service called Jet Black, which was an upscale product in select markets. They found they could drive change of customer behavior, so they could get product-market fit, but they found they couldn’t scale yet to a business model that would capture enough value that they could continue to grow it, so they wound that down. They have had success with health centers and micro-warehouses in stores. They’ve brought in robotics in some aspects of stocking. They’re even looking at edge computing, building on their combination of retail footprint and tremendous data. Walmart has tried a lot of things and been willing to test them and learn in the market what works. They’re not too attached to one idea but are looking in multiple places and scaling up those that are ready to grow in the market. Action Guide: Put the information David shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links: Pre-order The Digital Transformation Roadmap Check out David’s website Innovation Quote “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” – Mike Tyson 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

Why product managers need to understand customers’ needs We have had a lot of valuable guests on this podcast, and one of my favorites is Ken Gray. When we talked a few years ago for episode 046, he was the Global Director of Innovation for Caterpillar. Since leaving CAT, he has worked on 3D printing, advanced manufacturing, robotics, and more. He has also been a long-time supporter of the University of Iowa Institute for Vision Research, which is creating cures and solutions everyone can afford for vision diseases. Ken will be sharing lessons learned from years of product innovation wisdom.  Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [6:43] How do we discover what customers want and need? Innovation is people, culture, vision, and execution. Understanding what customers need is about having the right people on your team and building deep relationships with customers. You need people who spend a tremendous amount of time with customers to learn what they need. Customers generally don’t like to be on the bleeding edge of technology. They don’t want technology for technology’s sake or innovation for innovation’s sake. They have specific needs to improve their business. The most important product marketing work a company can do is understanding what customers need to improve their business performance and translating those needs into functional specifications, which define what a product needs to do to serve the customer’s needs. Functional requirements are the definition of what the product is, and technical requirements are the definition of how to engineer the product to deliver those functional requirements. [9:10] What tools do you use to understand and meet customers’ needs? Never write a product requirement document that isn’t prioritized. Never give engineering a flat list. Give them a prioritized list—at least high, medium, and nice-to-have. Otherwise you’re going to get the cool stuff first, which doesn’t necessarily align with what customers need. There are things customers need that they don’t tell you they need. You need to understand why customers behave the way they do beyond their spoken word. Whatever appeals to them psychologically needs to be satisfied as well. Those buying decisions are harder to uncover than purely technical ones. To uncover them, you have to get to know your customers really well. Maslow’s Hammer is the idea that if all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. This is unconscious bias. We tend to think if we have a technology that’s really cool or better than other technologies, people are going to come. It’s not that easy. You have to spend time understanding what drives success to the business and create an optimal product that helps your customers. You have to learn what customers need and explain your product to them. It isn’t about features and benefits. It’s about how your product improves your customer’s business—why they want it. If you can’t explain that to your customer on one sheet of paper, you’ve lost. [15:10] What are some other lessons you’ve learned related to product innovation? I would rather have an empty seat on my team than the wrong person in that seat. Don’t settle. Nurture the dissenting voice. Have people on your team who will tell you when you’re wrong and ask hard questions. [19:23] What tips do you have for working with team members? We had town hall meetings with employees. I would sit on stage and have people fire questions. I always learned more about what was going on with my customers, my product, and my team culture in those settings than in any other place. We always started these meetings with talking about safety. Everyone you work with—your team, customers, suppliers, and visitors—ought to have an expectation of getting to your facility safely, being there safely, and getting home safely. Then we got into how we were performing as a business. We showed profit and loss statements and took everyone through the numbers. We discussed the quality of the product and how it was performing. We talked about feedback we were getting and how customers were responding. We did these town halls on a routine basis so people got comfortable asking hard questions. My philosophy is I will always answer questions as long as they don’t violate insider trading rules or something like that. [26:51] How have you dealt with team members’ being afraid of you? I met with anyone who wanted to meet one-on-one. I started scheduling one-on-ones with people I didn’t know very well. I have lunch every day anyway, so I invited people to have lunch with me. When I was in Japan, in the factory there was a breakfast area where many of the leaders would meet before work to have breakfast. Everyone was invited. I started going to breakfast with the leaders, and they would discuss the topics that were on their minds at breakfast and not hide anything. They looked for our input and feedback. You eat breakfast and lunch anyway. Take advantage of the time that’s already there and make yourself available. We also did standup meetings. We had staff meetings where no one would sit because we wanted to get in, decide what we need to do, and get out. [26:45] Tell us about setting vision. Mark Randall, creator of Adobe Kickbox, told me, “You can’t create the energy of the storm, but you can help it coalesce. You want innovation in your company to coalesce. You’ve hired good people. They’re hungry to make a difference. It’s a storm. There’s tremendous energy in the storm. You want to set up lightning rods around which that storm will coalesce.” What he meant was, you have to have an overall vision that is around these lightning rods. When I was director of the excavation division at Caterpillar, I wanted my team to coalesce around ideas that would improve the performance, reliability, durability, owning and operating costs, emissions, and safety of the machines. If someone on my team had an idea—I don’t care how harebrained it is—and it impacted one of those areas, I had their back. One harebrained idea was putting the radiator and oil cooler alert on a hinge to swing out so we could clean it easily. It’s on just about every machine today. Putting GPS on every machine was insane in 1998. Now it’s standard. [30:45] Tell us about portfolio management. I want about 90% of innovations to take place in my core business. About 8% should be around projects in an adjacent space. About 2% should be in transformational, radical innovation. Action Guide: Put the information Ken shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links: Connect with Ken on LinkedIn Learn more about the University of Iowa Institute for Vision Research Listen to episode 046 with Ken Gray Innovation Quote “Anything that won’t sell, I don’t want to invent. Its sale is proof of utility, and utility is success.” – Thomas Edison 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 build trust and alignment on virtual teams Today we are talking about making virtual product teams more effective. Our guest is Anna Marie Clifton, Head of Product at Vowel. She is leading the effort to make virtual meetings more effective by turning them into searchable, sharable knowledge. Before Vowel, she held senior product management roles at Asana, Coinbase, and Yammer. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [1:57] How do you build trust among product team members on virtual teams? Trust is at the foundation of everything. Trust builds velocity. Trust builds product. It’s hard to build trust in virtual environments. When I had a distributed team at Coinbase, we were in a hybrid setting where some of the team was co-located and some of the team was not. That’s the hardest setting for building trust because there’s a local clique and remote participants. At Coinbase, we developed a mascot to give ourselves team culture. We chose the Count from Sesame Street because our team was working on trading, buying, and selling. We sent the Count stuffed animal to our colleagues who were not co-located with us as a symbol of our cohesion. One of the most important ways for leaders to build trust is being vulnerable and admitting mistakes. I go out of my way to call out any time I make a mistake in front of everyone whom I work with. You can do that not just in the moment but also in reference to a past mistake. That really humanizes yourself and sets the tone that it’s okay to make mistakes—this is a safe space. One of the best ways to build trust is to share vulnerability. If I’m being vulnerable with you, you can definitely trust me, because you have something you can hold over me. I’m in a position to be trusted because you have power. It’s critical especially for leaders to be vocal and vulnerable about current and past mistakes and set the tone of trust. For product managers joining a new team or organization, one of the best things to do to build a foundation of trust is to build early commitment. Say you’re going to do a thing and do that thing. Find things you are very confident you know how to do and that have a very short time window, say you will do them, and do them on time. Those actions give promissory notes that build trust, rapport, and expectation that you are a reliable person. When you move to a new organization, you start from a clean trust slate, and you have to really quickly build that balance sheet up. Giving people little commitments you can deliver on in the next 24 hours and doing that repeatedly in your first few weeks is one of the best ways to accelerate that. [10:30] How do you keep virtual teams aligned on product goals and priorities? Alignment is the most important aspect of team functioning, but maintaining alignment is challenging. Until you’re in an organization where there’s a lack of alignment, you don’t notice how completely frenetic it can be. If you move really quickly forward and you move really quickly backward, you’ve moved at a high speed but low velocity—you haven’t gone anywhere. One of the best ways you can improve velocity, especially as an organizational leader, is by focusing on alignment, not necessarily speed. Everything is always trending toward less alignment. The default state is as time moves forward, people are becoming less aligned. Your job as a product leader is to continue to pull people back into the alignment you have created. It’s all about communication. The adage “people have finally heard something once you’re tired of saying it” is true. At Vowel, we do an all-hands meeting every two weeks. Our product team will share a product update, and most product updates will include a high level reminder of product strategy. Every quarter we do a detailed all-hands meeting about the product strategy. What is our current product strategy? How, if at all, has it changed since the last quarter? If it stayed the same, you still have to say it again. I strongly encourage good posts in Slack or Teams. Communication with your teams in one-on-ones is important. One of my favorite ways to start a one-on-one conversation is with the question: “What’s the most important thing?” It’s a great question to pull your colleague out of the minutiae of tactics and into thinking about the most important thing for the company right now. People as individuals and teams as groups of individuals have a certain capacity for change. They can only absorb so much change so quickly. The capacity for change is a budget you get to spend as a leader. Give people a lot of heads-up notice of when a change is coming. That gives them a lot of confidence and security to execute the change and prepare to shift to the next thing when it’s time. You don’t necessarily need to know what the next thing is going to be. You can just say, “I think this is going to be important for about six months. We’ll do the next thing next. We’ll figure out what the right next thing is then.” It takes a while for people to shift perspective. If they were going in one direction and they’ve put all of their mental energy into getting really good at that, when you ask them to shift, they keep accidentally doing the prior thing on accident. It’s hard to unlearn that foundation of where you’re headed. Giving people a really strong heads up on when they’re not going to be headed in that direction anymore can help them switch more quickly to the next thing. At Vowel, we have demos every two weeks of what we have built. The engineer who is demoing the work talks about why it is important for the customer and what impact it’s supposed to have. This exercise means the engineers now have to know what the answer is to, “Why is this important?” This provides closer alignment between engineers and the product strategy and vision. The result is our engineering teams have become key collaborators in driving product ideas because they’re more deeply invested in where we’re going. [19:17] What advice do you have for team members (not leaders) to help make virtual teams more effective? The first thing is mindset. Take on the mindset that you have agency. The thing I love about culture is everything is contagious. And the thing I hate about culture is everything is contagious. As an individual, anything you start doing will spread to other people. If you want your team to be more invested in the product, start being more invested in the product. In any meeting, ask, “What is the goal of this meeting? What is the goal of this project? What is the goal of this bug fix? etc.” This question can help keep people out of these nitty-gritty weeds and up at the level of what matters. No matter what role you’re in, asking, “What’s the goal here?” is always going to work. If you start asking that question a lot, pretty soon you’re going to get promoted to the level of people whose job it is to make sure that question is being answered. I’m a huge fan of meeting agendas. Even for the most casual meetings, start the conversation with “Hey, what’s the agenda? What do we want to accomplish here?” This can help those long, awkward, rambly, never-ending conversations actually matter and not be so long and rambly. In the virtual space, you often don’t have a hard end time for the meeting, so everyone can keep chatting. Get good at knowing what you’re discussing and close the conversation once you’ve discussed that. This can give everyone time back and bring more energy to the conversation. When you end the conversation, be very clear on the next steps—who is doing what by when? It’s easy for thing to fall through the cracks with virtual teams. Be clear on the next steps you agreed upon, who is accountable for them, and when they will happen. When you can, use a public channel to discuss anything for work. There are lots of uses for private DMs, but I find the default in virtual environments is to DM someone because you don’t want to bother people. That’s actually counterproductive to effective virtual teams because it means work can feel empty. People can feel like they’re working by themselves when there’s nothing really happening that they can see. If you see people are having real work conversations, even if you’re not in them, it can keep your energy up. Using public channels is important so you can pull someone else into the conversation when you need to and provide them the shared context from your previous conversation. It’s so challenging to find content that’s stuck in DMs. It’s much easier when it’s in public channels. Use threads and reply in thread so people aren’t pinged all the time. It’s a little bit harder for team members to set Slack etiquette, but everything is contagious. If you start doing something right, and if you mention it to one or two of your friends, you can start a movement going. When you’re writing messages on Slack, think about the number of people who are going to read it, and put in the effort to make it clear and understandable commensurate with the size of the audience. Think about how fast and easy it will be to understand. For remote teams, change your calendar settings so guests are allowed to modify the event. Anyone can change the meeting time, which helps when you have team members in different time zones. No need to bicker about the meeting time. Just reschedule it. Record your meetings. That allows you as an attendee to decide if you need to be in the meeting as a participant or if you can catch up on the recording or look at an AI summary and jump into any relevant moment. You can save yourself hours of meetings by not being in ones that don’t matter to you. Recording allows you to search for anything you have forgotten from a meeting. Have your notes open during the meeting and accessible to everyone in the meeting. Write down your conclusions so you agree before you end the meeting. [32:35] What is Vowel and how does it help virtual teams collaborate? Vowel is a standalone video conference meeting solution. Instead of being just a video conference tool, it’s also everything before your call. You can collaborate on all your agendas before the call, and it’s a repository for the agendas and recording after the call. Immediately after the meeting, you get an AI summary that links to timestamps in the meeting. If you want to sign up for three months of Vowel for free, use code PRODUCT MASTERY. Action Guide: Put the information Anna Marie shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links: Connect with Anna Marie on LinkedIn or Twitter Learn more about Vowel and use code PRODUCT MASTERY for three months free Read Anna Marie’s article on Slack Etiquette Innovation Quote “It takes 10 years to create an overnight success” – unknown 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

Tools for planning and executing product projects Today we are talking about the skills product managers need to grow their careers. To help us, Neha Bansal  is with us. She is the Head of Merchant Growth and Monetization for Google’s B2B ecommerce business, where she is leading efforts to build the next $1B+ B2B business for the company. Before joining Google, Neha worked as a Management Consultant at Essex Product Consulting, where she helped organizations build products. Outside of her day job, she has guided many PdMs in reaching their career goals, and consequently, has good insights about the skills they need. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [3:10] What key topics do you discuss when you mentor product managers looking to further their careers? First, how can product managers establish processes to enable their teams to succeed? Processes include forums to sync with different members of your team and other teams, forums to get leadership alignment, ensuring high quality of deliverables, and OKR planning. Second is setting up the right funnels for access to users. I strongly believe that as a PdM, the biggest value you bring on your team is speaking to users and having a pulse of what your customers need. Third is setting goals. I have often spoken with PdMs who say they don’t think their team understands what they want. I help them rethink what they want in a quantitative way to determine a metric that defines success. [6:10] Tell us more about processes to help our teams succeed. Typically, there are two big phases in bringing a product from vision to launch: planning and execution. Planning includes the product vision, strategy, and roadmap. How do you set the vision, strategy, and roadmap? At what cadence do you do that? Who are the right stakeholders and partners to work with as you are setting your vision, strategy, and roadmap? What would be some tools to do that? Those are all important processes to be intentional about. At Google we do annual planning early in Q3 when I think through the vision and strategy for my product. We write a document that evolves over four to six weeks during which all of the leads from different teams contribute. First, we go out and talk to customers. I talk to our customer support team and sales team to understand what challenges they have been facing. We keep a pulse of where the industry is headed and what headwinds we expect. We tap into all of that to write the vision document. [8:27] What do you put into the product vision statement? Typically we create a vision for the next three to five years. We break that down to where we see the product in five years, three years, and two years, and what we need to do to deliver on that vision. The document includes at most two pages about the vision. The portion about strategy goes into more depth. This is where we think about how will we get to our vision. We start by looking at the data to substantiate why we think we can achieve that vision. We think about  our strengths, weaknesses, and competition. The strategy document provides North Star metrics. We describe the metric we care about, the target we want to achieve, where that metric is right now, and how much growth is expected each year. Finally we write the roadmap for year one. The roadmap provides specific projects that will help us hit our North Star metrics. [12:31] What tools do you use for planning and whom do you involve? As a product manager, I bring together the team to have equal ownership of the planning. I always do a two or three day offsite where I’ll bring the team together in person. We spend time understanding each other’s areas and then think about ideas. There are a lot of workshopping techniques you could use to help people come up with ideas. One of my favorite ones is having people take one minute and list all of the shortcomings in the product. Then we’ll have people talk through those and put them on sticky notes on a whiteboard. Then we’ll ask, “What do you think from here can actually be solved easily? And what is going to be a harder lift?” We’ll lay that down on a graph. You end up with a distribution of problems that have value in solving and can be solved right away as well as problems that have value in solving but will take more time. You as the PdM can put the brainstormed ideas into the first draft of the vision and strategy document. [15:34] How have you gotten product managers to spend time with customers? I tell PdMs who are in the early stages of their careers that it’s definitely important to make sure you talk to customers. I have had engineering teams applaud that I meet with at least three customers every week, regardless of whether it’s prescheduled for a particular project or not. That gives engineers trust that whatever I am asking them to build is actually required by the market and by our users. I cannot emphasize enough the need to continue to have a pulse of whom exactly you are building for. We are often able to build a list of customers who have opted-in to provide feedback to the product development team. If you don’t have that feature on your product, please build it. We reach out to the users who have opted-in and ask if they would like to speak with the product development team. If they say yes, we schedule calls with them. If you are building for an enterprise product, you’ll most likely be liaisoning with someone from the sales team. Make sure you have friends on the sales team. I provide access to launches and information to the sales teams so they can provide their clients early access to that information. Both the client and the sales teams appreciate that. I also attend sales calls and events that sales teams invite their clients to. [19:10] Tell us more about setting goals. How do we define what success should be? Typically, the topmost level goal for an organization is profit or revenue. That is the output metric. What you can really control as a product team are called input metrics, which cause an indirect impact on the output metrics. Setting input metrics depends a lot on the product and the specific piece that you’re trying to launch. For my team, we have very clear North star metrics for each product. For example, when I was head of brand management for YouTube video ads, we had three products: search lift, brand lift, and conversion lift. All of these products are used by advertisers to measure the effectiveness of their YouTube video ads. For each product, our output metric was total advertiser revenue, but for each product, the input metrics were different. For conversion lift, we were externalizing the product from being just an in-house tool to being an external-facing tool. Our input rate was the drop-off rate at various stages as we were doing this migration. For brand lift, our metric was reducing our survey load. For search lift, our metric was adoption. Then, we started thinking about levers that would affect each of the North Star metrics, and then we broke that down into smaller metrics. Usually the hardest part is prioritizing instrumentation of metrics. As a PdM, you can help your team prioritize. [23:07] Tell us more about execution. Assuming you have your roadmap crystal clear, now it’s time to execute the projects that you’ve listed on the roadmap. For the first project, start with writing a brief document that describes the project’s outcome. At Amazon, they call this PRFAQ. We write the PRFAQ thinking about what we’re going to say when we launch this externally. That helps drive a lot of clarity. Next, start doing user research to validate the pain points that you came up with as a hypothesis. Once you have a certain degree of validation, write a product requirements document. This typically covers what problem we are trying to solve, why we need to solve it, why we need to solve it now, and what impact we are expecting. Then go into more depth around the phasing of the product launch. Write about the requirements for phase zero. Requirements are like a contract with engineering and the UX team. Once I have a first draft of this document, I immediately get my team in the room and get feedback from everyone. Your team will share things you didn’t even think about or didn’t know. When the document is 70-80% ready, we do UX research to validate the solution we’re proposing. Next, we go into UX designing. Developers write their backend design documents, and then you go into development mode. Once development is completed, we all get together again to bug bash and break what we made. As a PdM, I do a lot of prioritization to figure out what is blocking the launch  and what’s not. In parallel, I do launch prep, which includes writing blog posts and help center articles, lining up road shows, and preparing comms for sales and marketing. Finally, hopefully the day comes when you can start rollout. I’ve typically done a phase rollout. Don’t celebrate yet though. Wait for the feature to land. We track the metrics for at least two or three months post-launch, and once we see the metrics performing well, we go ahead and celebrate the launch. [28:14] How do you help engineering understand the requirements? I record every single user conversation and put snippets in my presentation. I start my presentation with the user describing the pain point. I always have some sense of what is bothering the engineering lead, so I use snippets to establish those points. Engineer’s objections are often around infrastructure, so it helps when you have already addressed those concerns to some extent. For example, one of my projects was privacy sensitive. I got a privacy approval from the privacy office and put a screenshot in my presentation. Action Guide: Put the information Neha shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful link: Check out Neha on Substack  Innovation Quote “The most dangerous phrase in the language is, ‘We’ve always done it this way.’ ” – Grace Hopper   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

Understanding the roles of product managers, project managers, and product owners Today we are talking about a frequently asked question, which is how are product and project management related. We’ll discuss the differences and similarities between the two. Joining us is Peter Monkhouse. He is a product owner and entrepreneur, with NewGenP being his latest company. Peter is an experienced speaker, educator, and consultant with over 40 years of experience leading teams and organizations to deliver value through projects. He has held several roles with the Project Management Institute, including Chair and Director of the Board. Peter’s latest book is Gen P: New Generation of Product Owners who Care about Customers.  Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:09] Can you share an example of a project that resulted in a new product? The definition of a project is a temporary endeavor to create a unique product, service, or result. One project I worked on was the installation of telephone billing systems. A telephone billing system is a product that a telephone company uses to send you those awful monthly telephone bills. We had a project to customize a telephone billing system to meet a company’s unique needs for their customer and then to install it for them to create the telephone bills. That’s an example of a project being used to create and deliver a product. The telephone company used the telephone billing system to generate invoices to get revenue. That allows them to continue to provide telephone service and add new functions and features to their telephone company. Every project we’ve worked on has delivered a product. And conversely, if we want to add a new feature to an existing product or create a new product, we’re going to do that through a project. [5:05] What are the key roles involved in project and product management? The project manager is the person who leads a team to deliver the product or service. Typically, the project manager is successful when they deliver the product on time, on budget, and within the scope and quality that’s expected by the client or the user. A project manager typically will report to a project sponsor, someone who is accountable for having that project completed on time, obtains the benefits of the product, and funds the project. A project sponsor could be a product owner or a product manager who owns the product and is worrying about the full lifecycle of the product, continuing to add more features and functionality to it to extend the lifecycle of the product and deliver more value to customers. A product owner could be the project sponsor or a business owner. They could also take the role of a customer—someone who makes sure the product meets the necessary criteria. In the telephone billing system example, my customer was the IT department, which was the product owner for the billing system. I would deliver the product to my customer who would then test it to make sure it met the necessary criteria to go into production and start being used to generate telephone bills. They also had a product owner on the business side who involved people from the finance department, customer care, and new product development to make sure the billing system would function appropriately. The product owner will be looking after the product from birth to death. They are trying to understand what value the customer is looking for from the product and what problem the customer has that the product is solving. Then they take that feedback from the customer to see how they’re going to enhance the product to better meet the customer needs and deliver more value to the customer with the objective of trying to make sure the product will stay current and relevant for as long as possible. I see the terms product manager and product owner being used very interchangeably now. In my book Gen P, we are talking about a product owner as someone who has a passion for the product and who will be the advocate and key spokesperson for the product. The product owner is future-oriented—asking, how is the product going to grow and help the organization be successful? The product manager might be a more transaction-oriented individual who is just working on getting the product from point A to point B. [14:51] Can you tell us more about the product owner role and how it’s different from the product manager role? One of the reasons my co-author Joanna and I wrote our book, Gen P, was we felt that the Agile world had inappropriately used the term product owner. Scrum has used the term product owner to refer to someone who is the internal voice on the project team to represent the voice of the customer. I think this is a disservice to the term. We are talking about a product owner as a higher level role—someone who directs a team of people who will support the product as it goes through its lifecycle. They collect feedback from customers, navigate the internal parts of an organization to come up with a roadmap, and get the funding to continually invest in the product to make sure it’s continually delivering value. They think about how that product will help the organization be successful in achieving benefits, show why it’s important to invest in the product internally, and show customers why they need to acquire the product to be successful. If an organization doesn’t have this role, the product is going to fail. [21:53] Can you share a story highlighting the importance of product owners? You might remember the Blackberry phone. The two founders of Blackberry were really the product owners. They were focusing on the direction of the product and thinking about where the technology was going and how they were going to evolve the Blackberry to stay current. They got a lawsuit from IBM about copyright infringement, which occupied their time and energy. At the same time, Apple introduced the iPhone, and Apple convinced US carriers that data should be cheap.  The whole Blackberry model up to that point was based on minimizing data and having higher security. Apple got rid of that advantage, and Blackberry missed it. They missed that change because they were focused on other things, and it led to the demise of the company. This is a dramatic example of where the value of a product owner is—to keep focusing on what’s going on in the marketplace and where the shifts are so they can prepare their product to take advantage of these shifts and not be swallowed up by a competitor as Blackberry was by the iPhone. [24:31] What is getting in the way in organizations that don’t do a good job understanding customers or executing projects executed well? Many of the problems that we have around product support are due to the curse of quarterly reporting. Companies that are traded publicly have to issue their results every quarter. If they don’t meet the expectations of the analysts, then the stock price drops, and then the shareholders get upset, and then the CEO gets fired from their nice, well paying job. They don’t want that to happen, so they tend to be focused on large, shorter term decisions in order to make sure that they’re going to meet the expectations for the quarter. The easiest thing to cut is investing in new products. These organizations will not focus on the future sustainability of the organization. They don’t think about how they’re going to continue to invest in products to make sure they’re delivering value, how they’re going to continue to get feedback from their customers, how they’re going to continue to invest in their project teams in order to deliver the enhancements on time, on budget, and on scope to allow their products to be successful and to hit market in time to stay competitive. If we want our organization to be successful for a long time, we have to continue to invest in our products and evolve. Organizations are struggling with the complexity of the world today. We have so many technology disruptors coming in. We have the ability to sell anywhere in the world, but so do our competitors. Organizations are struggling to understand who their competitor is or what technologies are coming. That makes it hard for organizations to invest in products and to be willing to take risks. Action Guide: Put the information Peter shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links: Check out Peter’s book, Gen P Visit Peter’s website, NewGenP Connect with Peter on LinkedIn Innovation Quote “Projects delivery products, products delivery strategy.” – Peter Monkhouse 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

What product managers need to know about augmented reality Today we are talking about augmented reality and what product managers and leaders need to know about this rapidly changing field that is becoming part of many digital transformation programs. Our guest has created several products using augmented reality, including a phone-based vision test at Warby Parker, the Neiman Marcus digital mirror that makes trying on and selecting clothes easier, the SalesForce conversational balance table, and much more. His name is David Rose, and he’s an MIT lecturer, an author, and a serial entrepreneur who offers a unique perspective on the next platform of spatial computing—what he calls SuperSight. This is also the title of his latest book, SuperSight: What Augmented Reality Means for Our Lives, Our Work, and the Way We Imagine the Future. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:13] What is the real-world metaverse? I’m trying to highlight the difference between virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR). A lot of people, when they think of metaverses, think about roadblocks, Minecraft, multiplayer games, etc. Those are all virtual environments where you are sealed off and the real world is obscured from your vision. By the real-world metaverse, I mean laying information over the existing architecture, city, and water of the places that we go in order to make those places easier to navigate or imagine how they might change in the future. I’m talking about taking all of the internet and spatially anchoring it in the real world. [3:57] You have created several products related to this real-world metaverse. Tell us about how you get ideas for products. For me, good ideas for projects or innovation come from a confluence of three things: The first is user need or insights about people. I’ll give an example of an application to boating. I’m a boater, and I’m regularly disoriented out on the water. That’s the user need component. The second thing is a technological maturity component. In the case of the boating application, it’s computer vision. Computer vision can now identify things in front of your boat. The third thing is the viability of the business idea or a way to scale. For me, this usually comes from meeting a go-to-market partner who could help commercialize the technology.  [9:14] Can you tell us more about the boating product example? I was speaking about my new book at a healthcare conference. We had shown how we could see through the human body for surgery planning. A fisherman approached me afterward and said he wanted to be able to see through the water to avoid hazards and see where to fish. Underwater maps existed, but he wanted to be able to see without using his hands. I wondered if we could spatially anchor the underwater maps in glasses so you could see the terrain underwater as if you’re in a glass-bottomed boat. We started off using Unity, a 3D game engine. We got the maps from ArcGIS, which is a spatial company. We made a mockup using glasses called Nreal, which are now at Verizon stores. We started prototyping the magic moment of seeing through the water. It was pretty compelling, but the more we used it, the more we realized that the glasses really weren’t the way to scale this and get it to market. We talked to a company called Freedom Boat Club that has a boat membership model for new boaters who don’t have a boat or for people who are going to boat in a new place. We figured out that the best way to image the world around you was to put a camera on top of the boat. We used computer vision with a 360-degree camera system that sits on top of the boat. It uses computer vision to see everything that’s around you that might be a hazard, and then it mixes that with cartography, so that the screen that’s sitting next to you when you’re driving the boat shows you ideal paths, safe passage tracks so you won’t run aground, other vessels, or other objects in the water. It took a lot of learning to do this project. Product innovators need to be dauntless in their ability to learn and quickly prototype. We learned a lot from America’s Cup, which is work done by Stan Honey to use augmented reality to make sailing more accessible for normal people to watch and understand. He made the race look like a football field with little virtual flags to tell you how fast the boats are going. The innovation lesson for product managers is use familiar metaphors. Make your big innovation look incremental. Stan Honey could have done a lot, but instead, his incremental innovation was to make sailing look like football. As product managers, even though we may have big, bold ideas of how to remake something in a totally new way, it will probably get more adoption and understanding if you use a familiar metaphor, iconography, or naming. [18:28] What changes in the real-world metaverse or trends in technology should product managers expect? The tools that are coming out that allow you to manipulate 3D models and reduce the weight of both making 3D models and putting 3D models into the world are a huge change. There are now asset stores like Turbo Squid, CG Trader and stock photo sites that sell 3D models. There are tools like Polycam that allow you to use the LiDAR on every iPhone to digitize a space. The ability to scan and image things is a total game changer. For teams wanting to get into prototyping in AR quickly, I recommend Adobe Arrow, which is a no-coding environment, and Reality Composer. Snapchat is probably the most successful AR product out there. Three hundred million people, ten or twelve times a day share pictures of themselves with face filters and face decorations. There’s rabid adoption of AR for the front-facing camera and for applying decorations or virtual layers to the real world. If you want to get into that, you could play with Snap Studio, which is a low code wiring-up environment. A lot of people see those Snap decorations and think this is just a toy. However, when I worked at Warby Parker, AR was an opportunity to help people select which glasses would fit them and look good. With that confidence, people don’t need to try on the glasses in a store. If you have a virtual try-on that is really convincing, people will make purchase decisions from that. Action Guide: Put the information David shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links: Learn more about SuperSight Check out EnchantedObjects.com Learn more about the Clear Water LookOut system for boaters Watch a LookOut demonstration video Innovation Quote “Prototype the magic moments first.” – David Rose Thanks! Thank you for taking the journey to product mastery and learning with me from the successes and failures of product innovators, managers, and leaders. 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 mangers can improve collaboration in cross-functional teams Today we are talking with Maziar Adl, the co-founder and CTO of Gocious, an organization that creates product roadmap management software. When I met Maziar and he told me about his company, I asked why does the world need another roadmapping company given the abundance of current options to product managers. His answer intrigued me because it identified a clear pain point that isn’t getting enough attention. Then when I heard his backstory in technology leadership roles at Xerox and Experian and the challenges he encountered with product roadmaps, I was eager to invite him to be a guest on this podcast. As the title of this episode conveys, our discussion will weave together topics for aligning customers’ needs and business strategy.  Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:36] What problems have you ran into related to aligning business strategy and product work? In product management, I often saw silos coming from top to bottom. The executive team makes decisions and translates those decisions to different parts of the organization, but mission for everybody to walk toward got lost in translation. Bottom up, there were also issues. The engineering team works on progressing the product but doesn’t communicate information back up to product management or executive groups. The role of product management is extremely in flux. It’s evolving so fast. There are courses in product management, but 15 years ago you couldn’t get a PhD in product management and come out knowing how everything works. Product managers bring many skills together to make it work. The role isn’t well defined, and processes and tools are evolving too. When I was the director of engineering, I often saw that what I understood the product to be was different from how directions of other departments in the organization understood the product. There was a big gap in communication at the executive level. That’s when I realized there was a need for a tool that can bring cross-functional teams together. [6:52] Did you find a gap in the roadmapping tools that were available before you started Gocious? There were two types of tools that were available. Many of the tools product managers use on a day-to-day basis are engineering-focused ticketing systems. They’re about cutting sprints and prioritizing user stories. An executive or someone in sales or finance cannot understand much from these tools about what product is coming out next month or next year. These tools don’t help product managers explain features to others. There are other tools that do some of this work of explaining features for you, but they don’t show the portfolio of products. They aren’t organized in a way that somebody in sales can look at a product and see the history of innovation on that product or what else is coming into the market. These tools mostly show initiatives. You can see activities that are going on to improve areas of the product, and you can see how those initiatives are organized, but you can’t see how an entire product evolved over time. You don’t see the big picture. I realized that if everyone at the company is on the same page about the company’s portfolio of products and can see the evolution of the products, it will make a huge difference in the way cross-functional teams come together to discuss the next stage of the products that have to come out the door. [10:31] What was your experience at Experian? I was the CTO in a part of the organization called consumer services. We had a direct-to-consumer product. We had a lot of feedback from focus groups and call centers. We had meetings to discuss opportunities for new products. Later, we went through a major transformation and started focusing more on driving the business from a customer’s perspective. Product management became more central in receiving customer feedback and making sure it was properly translated and analyzed. Prior to that, it was a much slower process and not everything was analyzed. The product team wasn’t as central to everything we did. Engineering had a lot of power. Product helped prioritize, but engineering often built a product and expected us to try to sell it. [14:27] What did you do to better align customer needs and business strategy? At Experian, when I was CTO, I worked with our chief product officer to reorganize my team of 150 engineers so we had proper product management coverage for engineering efforts. The CPO heled me align how product management and engineering coordinated with each other and the rest of the business. At the same time, our group started putting more rigor into product management. The CPO put together a product board, which met on a regular basis to review the major items coming in. Product managers from different parts of the product would review cases to open new markets and achieve our objectives, and engineers could weigh in. This was an opportunity to make sure activities are in line with the objective of the organization. At first it was clunky, but through practice we kept improving that process. When we saw things not working well, not only would we correct it, but it was an opportunity for executives to lend a hand to product management. These meetings grew the product team and gave them empowerment. They helped product managers and engineers communicate effectively. Our original vision for Gocious was to help manufacturing in product planning and collaborating about the future innovation of products. I consider manufacturing to be two classes. There are certain companies that have found a niche and there’s not a lot of innovation happening in the company. For example, there’s not a lot of innovation in clothes hangers, but it’s very hard to get into the market, so nobody’s challenging those companies. The second class is complex products. Almost every complex manufacturing company is going through some major disruption. They really need to rethink the products in a lot of areas. Software technology is playing a more central role in hardware being manufactured, which means hardware teams have to change the way they design their products. For example, in the past you couldn’t change the operating system on a computer, but now you can. This is also happening more to other products from cars to jets to industrial machinery. That means  software teams will play a more central role in product development. There haven’t been major innovations in hardware manufacturing, but software development has created new processes like Lean and Agile. As software teams come in to manufacturing, they will change the way manufacturers think about the product development lifecycle. This is a great opportunity for product management to have a more central role to bring teams together and connect them with the bigger business. Gocious would be a great option for these environments. Our focus is to enhance this area of larger software products or companies that are bringing more and more software into their hardware environments. Action Guide: Put the information Maziar shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links: Learn more about Gocious Connect with Maziar on LinkedIn Innovation Quotes “I want to put a ding in the universe.” – Steve Jobs “If you look at history, innovation doesn’t come just from giving people incentives; it comes from creating environments where their ideas can connect.” – Steven Johnson 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

What a community can do for your product – for product managers Today we are talking about building a community for a brand or product. Which reminds me that this episode is sponsored by the Product Mastery Now Community—that’s right, we have a community for listeners of this podcast. Do you want to meet the podcast guests and ask them questions? We make that happen because community members are invited to the live recordings, which take place three months before they are published publicly. Want additional expert sessions? We make that happen too. Want to join a mastermind for peer-learning? That’s also part of the community. You can also search all the past episodes (over 400 at this point) to learn insights on any topic. Find out more and apply to be a member at ProductMasteryNow.com/Community. So this episode is about communities. What can a community do for a brand or product? It can provide growth, help clarify messaging that resonates with your ideal customer, and provide co-creation opportunities. LEGO, Starbucks, Wyze Consumer Electronics, and many more companies have found customer communities essential to their growth. To help us explore what is involved in creating a community, Bri Leever is with us. She is a community strategist who designs and implements communities for brands. She is also the person who helped me create the Product Mastery Now Community, and she shared many valuable insights with me in the process.  You’ll find her at Ember Consulting, which she founded to help companies build meaningful communities. She and her colleagues also post dissections of public communities on Youtube at her Bri Leever channel. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [3:49] Why should product people care about communities? I like to frame community work in a product-driven perspective—What’s a problem our customer has, and how can we create a product that can help solve that problem for them? The community-led approach asks, What’s a problem our customer has, and how can we foster a space where that customer can start to solve that problem with other people who are solving a similar problem? When you’re coming from a product perspective, once you’ve solved the problem you lose insight into how that problem continues to evolve for the customer. The community-led approach creates a space where that conversation about the problem is happening. You can stay extremely attuned to the problem you’re trying to solve, whether you have a product that helps solve that problem or just foster the community space. Product and community work well together because a community gives you the landscape to test new ways to solve that problem and keeps you attuned to how the problem evolves for your target customer. [6:51] What are some different kinds of communities? Ambassador community—community members have sales incentives to sell products. Customer support community Product community—where you can get input from your top customers Customer success community—focused on learning, especially for highly technical products that requires a course to enhance the customer experience A healthy community is highly cross-functional and hits different objectives across different departments in your organization. Usually the best place to start is to pick one, get some traction, and go from there. [8:55] What is an example of a public community that does many things well? The LEGO IDEAS community is a product community where members can propose a CAD design of a new LEGO set, people can vote on it, and it can be brought to production. There was on highly engaged member who had earned a special badge in the community, which they had put in their Instagram profile. When someone’s status in an internal community becomes so important to that they share it externally as an identifier, that’s when you know something really powerful is happening in the community. Another example is the Spotify community. They have focused their community efforts more on their product, the Spotify app. One of my main critiques is they have not fostered micro-communities for their artists. [14:26] What are some practical tips for making a community happen? To get started, regardless of where you’re at in the community-building journey, get on the phone with your top customers. You have to understand what your customers are looking for and what types of people they’re looking to connect with. Get on the phone with 30 or 100 people. You’ll have a community strategy born out of those conversations. A slightly more scalable approach is hosting a focus group with some of your top customers, which is something Chad and I did when launching the Product Mastery Now community. There was one member up at 2am in Eastern Europe for the focus group. It was crazy how committed these people were that they were willing to get up in the middle of the night to be part of co-creating the community. Although it won’t work for every community, consider making your community a landscape where you are connecting experts to people who are trying to learn something. In a brand-led approach, the brand puts out content to teach people in the community. In a community-led approach, the community is a place where people collaborate and create content together.  A great way to make your community a landscape like that is to make is a gathering place where experts and lay people are able to meet. One of the first mistakes I usually see in communities is the brand just produces content rather than creating a space where members can create content with each other. This doesn’t mean you don’t have to be involved in the community. There’s actually more work because you have to be more thoughtful about how you are prompting people to participate. It’s a lot easier to write an article than it is to influence people’s behaviors to create something themselves. Avoid thinking you have to have a ton of content to have a community. We tend to equate chatter with conversation, but having lots of comments doesn’t necessarily mean there’s valuable conversation happening in your community. Not everything needs to be super serious in your community, but watch out for vanity metrics to inflate your ego more than metrics that matter for the community. [23:13] What are your thoughts on looking for a technical platform to host a community? We’re not talking about a community of people commenting on social media posts. We’re talking about a dedicated space where you are fostering not just your relationship with your customer but also relationships between customers. That is so important and valuable it necessitates its own dedicated space. People think they can build communities on Facebook and Slack. To me, there are three pillars of community—events, conversation, and content. Slack provides only conversations. Facebook groups don’t foster a dedicated space for community. Analogously, it’s hard to foster community at a Starbucks inside a Target store than in a beautiful boutique coffee shop. You need a dedicated space that is safe and exclusive to your community. Instead, use a community platform. I tend to build communities in creator community platforms. The Product Mastery Now community is an example of a creator community. For creator communities, there are three main platforms. The oldest and most well-known is Mighty Networks. I do not recommend it because the user experience is incredibly difficult to navigate and it’s built on old technology. Circle is where we built Chad’s Product Mastery Now community. They’re an asynchronous platform that started with a heavier emphasis on conversation, but they’ve built out a lot more functionality around events and content. They also have courses now. Heartbeat is the newest one. They are more events-centric. If the events pillar in your community is the strongest, Heartbeat might be a better fit. They also have courses and conversations. Circle and Heartbeat are fairly templated. You can change the format of the spaces, but they tend to be really easy to get up and running and cost-effective because they’re not completely customizable. [29:49] What are the mistakes you’ve seen made in community design that we should avoid? Pay attention to habit formation and how you’re incentivizing people. This should follow three steps: prompt, action, reward. Think about all the actions a member could take that would be a win for the community—creating an introduction post, volunteering to lead an accountability group, or proposing a new idea to the community. Then work backwards to figure out what the prompt for the action is. Consider supporting resources, such as training. Then figure out what the reward will be. Nine times out of ten it is not a financial reward. My favorite type of reward is recognition, and it is the most powerful type of reward, even more than financial rewards. Influence habit formation through those three steps in order: prompt, action, reward. Often, people designing communities make the mistake of reversing that order. In ambassador programs, influencers are sent the product and asked to post about it, Don’t hand out gree stuff hoping it will inspire people to take action. It’s not going to work. Provide the reward after the action. Action Guide: Put the information Bri shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links: Watch Bri’s YouTube channel Learn more about Ember Consulting and sign up for Bri’s newsletter Innovation Quote “Vulnerability is the birthplace of innovation, creativity, and change.” – 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

Learn from the 2022 winner of PDMA’s Outstanding Corporate Innovator award – for product managers For each of the last 36 years, the Outstanding Corporate Innovator award has been provided by PDMA to an organization that excels in innovation. At the time of this recording, the last winner was Hershey, and I was at their award ceremony. There were boxes of Hershey chocolate treats for everyone. It was a good ceremony :)  We are going to learn what has made Hershey an outstanding innovator, gaining insights that might help you and your organization. With us is Charlie Chappell, the VP of Innovation and R&D at Hershey, and Greg Coticchia, the CEO of Sopheon. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [1:54] Charlie, why did Hershey decide to apply for the OCI award? We thought we were having some success as an innovative company, but it’s always good to get an external perspective. We decided to pursue the OCI award as a learning exercise and a moment of inspiration for the company. Applying proved to be a galvanizing effort because we had a lot of people in the company involved as we thought about our innovation process from end to end. It helped bring the team together. Winning provided great external validation and energized the team to ask, what more could we do now with innovation? I recommend applying for the OCI award to colleagues working in other places, especially if you’re at a stage where you’re assessing your innovation operations now. Applying for the OCI award is a great way to document what you’re doing. It’s not for the faint of heart. There’s a lot you put into the application. You get a lot of feedback from PDMA. They do a site visit. It is a lot of work, but the benefit we’ve gotten out of it has been well worth the effort. [4:01] Charlie, what are the innovation practices that makes Hershey an outstanding innovator? Everything for us starts with strategy—both innovation strategy and corporate and total enterprise strategy. In the application, we shared our enterprise strategy and specifically the significant role innovation plays in that. We highlighted how we translate that strategy into the projects we pursue. We had clear KPIs of what innovation had to deliver. We shared how we set up a process and tools to manage and govern projects so we’re hitting our goals. We demonstrated we were meeting and beating our goals. We also emphasized how innovation isn’t just an R&D function or innovation group. We bring in the entire organization and involve everybody in innovation. Everyone plays a role, whether that’s our supply chain partners, sales partners, marketing partners, finance partners. Everybody contributes to what innovation is at the Hershey company. [5:58] How do you communicate the organization strategy throughout the organization to help keep everyone on the same page? Communicating strategy starts at the highest level of the company. Our CEO and executive committee members make a very concerted effort to share the enterprise strategy with every employee in the company. By the time I go to my team, they’ve already heard the strategy from my bosses. I communicate what that means to us. We make sure all our projects align to the strategy. We don’t want to pivot too much on our strategy, but we also need to evolve. Especially at the front end, we’re having discussions all the time, asking, “Does this project still fit with the strategy? Where does it fit in the priorities of everything we’re doing? If it’s not a high priority, what else could we do with those resources?” And then we pivot. At the same time, at the front end we need to see what’s coming next and make a pivot in strategy because of what we’re seeing happen in the marketplace. [10:08] Is there a tool you use for aligning projects to your strategy? We don’t use tools so much, but we do use organizational structures around where we put priorities. Within the innovation team, if we have total enterprise priorities, we organize our teams by which teams are working on each priority. The plans keep getting more and more granular as you go down into the organization. We have a rigorous process of setting individual and team priorities and goals for the year. We do goal sharing meetings were we make sure our teams and partners are aligned. We find where the pinch points are and discuss what problems we have to solve collectively to be able to do everything we need to do. We have a ten-year vision that sets big priorities. Then we do strategy planning for the next three to five years. Then we do annual planning. As the annual plan is finalized, everybody sets their individual goals based off that. Those are the goals our performance is measured against at the end of the next year. [12:51] How do you make innovation’s everyone’s job? For us, there are two definitions of innovation. Product innovation is a new product that goes to market, is sold to consumers, and drives revenue growth. Second, in the entire company, innovation is about problem solving. No matter where you are in the organization, you could innovate. Right now, HR is having to innovate by figuring out how to keep the culture of the company while giving people the flexibility that remote working has enabled. We’re a very collaborative culture; at the end of the day, everybody is trying to drive toward one goal, which is to make the company successful. There’s less turf wars. The culture makes it possible for people to accept others’ ideas. [14:55] How do you equip people for innovation? It starts with hiring people who have a passion for innovation and a curiosity to learn and who want to create new things. We put systems, tolls, training, and space in place to teach people how to gain consumer insights, analyze a marketplace, and see around corners. We train people to take a great idea and commercialize it, get it through the organization, and go to market. On the product development side, we do a lot of technical training on confection. [16:51] Greg, What does Sopheon do and how are you part of Hershey’s success? Sopheon is a world leader in innovation management. We provide software and services to help companies like Hershey. We help companies make the idea-to-commercialization process a reality. Sopheon helps companies make better decisions. If you can automate a process, get efficiencies out of the innovation process, assign resources appropriately, and make better bets, then you can unlock better business decisions around your innovation investment. That’s the value proposition of what Sopheon does. For years, we did that with one product, Accolade, which is used at Hershey. Over the last two years, we’ve also been innovating here, and we’ve added several new products to focus our footprint to serve our customers better, and service the market better. []19:08 What’s an example of how Hershey makes better decisions because of Accolade? Greg: Accolade started out by automating the gate process. Many people still use the gate or phase gate process. Everybody needs to go through a decision-making process to make innovation investments. You have to have a risk mitigation process and resource allocation. Accolade helps you track goals in alignment with strategy. You won’t be able to scale a company of the size and stature and portfolio of products like Hershey unless you have that alignment, and you won’t be able to do that with Excel spreadsheets. Many people try to do it with homegrown products or retrofitted project management tools, but they’re not purposely built for innovation. We’ve brought to Hershey a product that is built as a focus lens for a product innovation process. Charlie: The biggest thing Sopheon has done for us is helping us manage complexity. It made us so much so much more efficient in the decision-making process because it captures all the data that are needed from various places within the organization and puts it all in one place. As we’re going through our product portfolio, there are hundreds of projects every year, and Accolade allows us to get through them efficiently. We can understand the trade-offs between them. We implemented this just as COVID was coming in, and it made the transition from doing this in-person to doing it completely virtual almost seamless because all the information and data were there. Greg:  Sopheon helps companies and leaders answer the questions, “What did we do? What resources did we apply? What capital did we apply? Are we getting the outcomes relative to our strategy for our innovation dollars?” [23:50] Can you give an example of innovation at Hershey? Our biggest brand is the Reese’s brand. It’s the third biggest brand in all of snacking. It’s the perfect combination of chocolate and peanut butter, but there are so many different ways you can experience taht. One of our innovations has been making the Reese’s even more perfect by adding more things into it. We put in pretzels, potato chips, and Reese’s pieces. The latest innovation was a Reese’s cup with Resse’s puffs inside. You can’t just dump the puff cereal in and it magically happens. We went through a whole innovation process to replicate the experience of eating Reese’s puffs cereal but putting it inside a Reese’s cup. We had to figure out which size cup to put it in, how to put it in, and how to maintain the cereal’s crunchiness. When we state the idea to any consumer, they want it, but going through the process to make it adds complication to manufacturing. Going through that is really rewarding. Another innovation is the different sizes of Reese’s cups. We find some consumers love it more for the chocolate and some love it more for the peanut butter. The different sizes give you different ratios of chocolate and peanut butter. We even have a half-pound Reese’s cup. The Reese’s Thin is for people who love Reese’s but sometimes don’t want that much. The marketing campaign was, “They get to your mouth faster.” It was still about the enjoyment of the product while communicating a different way to enjoy it. Action Guide: Put the information Charlie and Greg shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links: Find out more about Sopheon Check out the Innovation Talks podcast Check out Hershey’s website Innovation Quote “I reserve the right to be smarter tomorrow.” – Charlie’s colleague 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