Product Mastery Now for Product Managers, Leaders, and Innovators

Using product ops to standardize product management processes Today we are talking about product ops—what it is, if you need it, and how to get started. Joining us is Steve Johnson, a returning guest. He is an author, speaker, and product coach. His market and technical savvy allowed his career to develop from Product Manager to Chief Marketing Officer.  Steve is the author of  Turn Ideas Into Products and co-creator of the popular Quartz Open framework. Before co-founding Product Growth Leaders, his product management consulting company, he was a Pragmatic Marketing lead instructor for over 15 years. Now he empowers product teams with training and coaching that remove the chaos from product strategy and planning.  Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:57] What does product ops do? Product ops is product management for product management. It’s looking at the friction of doing product management and standardizing it so we’re all using the same artifacts, methodologies, and research. Product ops involves getting clarity on roles and responsibilities and standardizing methodologies and artifacts. There are many methods for product ops, like BRICE, RICE, and Kano. I don’t care which one you are using, as long as everyone is using the same method. Product ops should involve standardizing onboarding, access to data, and systems. It involves guiding and coordinating customer research. Product management’s primary job is to scale our product business, and product ops is about scaling product management. I work with teams, and often I find it’s the first time they’ve ever gotten together to talk about how they do product management. If everybody is doing their own thing, you end up with an overwhelming number of things to keep track of, and everything the team produces or presents to the leadership team looks like it came from a different company. [14:37] How does an organization know it needs product ops? You should start thinking about it when you have three product managers and have product ops in place when you have four product managers. That’s when you start seeing deviation among product managers’ work. I strongly encourage product leaders to have monthly get-togethers on Zoom where product managers present a topic and the product team discusses how they do product management in the organization. Have the “how do we do things here?” conversations frequently. [20:26] How can organizations start putting in place a product ops capability? If you have three or four product managers, a product ops role would be part-time. If you have seven to ten, you want to hire somebody full-time. Follow a product project from idea to market and map the best process for the company. I recommend the Quartz Open Framework, which involves six steps from idea to market. For each step, you figure out the artifacts and ceremonies, and the framework provides you a structure for getting from idea to launch. Learning occurs at every step, not just the beginning and the end. One challenge a lot of product ops projects run into is trying to make a company-wide holistic process. Limit it to what the product manager is doing and whom they’re doing it with. It’s key to recognize products are built by teams, not by individuals. We need to be really clear on what artifacts I’m going to create, how I’m going to hand them to you, and how we’re going to collaborate. I don’t like the phrase handoff, which implies I throw it over the wall. Instead, think of a baton handoff in a relay race—a carefully practiced interaction involving explicit communication. Take the idea all the way from idea to market and figure out where you coordinate with UX, development, marketing, and sales and how to have that communication. Write it down. Now you have a playbook and an onboarding guide. [26:42] How can senior leadership be involved in product ops? I have found that if somebody on the leadership team is not supporting your project it will ultimately fail. That said, I don’t think most executives have any concept of the scope of roles and responsibilities, and I certainly don’t want the VP of sales telling me what product management ought to be doing. Having a product management-savvy senior leader involved is critical, but let’s apply product management to creating product ops. Interview stakeholders and see where their friction is. Interview the VPs of sales, marketing, etc., and ask, “What can we do to better serve you in our roles as product managers?” Action Guide: Put the information Steve shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links: Visit ProductGrowthLeaders.com Connect with Steve on LinkedIn Check out Turn Ideas into Products Learn more about the Quartz Open Framework and get free, ready-to-use templates Innovation Quotes “Our opinions, while interesting, are irrelevant.” – Steve Johnson “Nothing seems hard to the people who don’t have to do it.” – Steve Johnson “When I decide just exactly who the song is going to help out, I can really scribble ‘er down in a hurry.” – Woody Guthrie 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

The ABCD framework for dealing with tensions in product management and innovation As product innovators, we encounter many tensions. To name just a few of these, perhaps meeting this quarter’s objective or creating the breakthrough of the future, perhaps the team building we want to do or having more personal flexibility, or what about process improvement or just getting the job done that is in front of us right now. Research has found that such tensions reflect underlying paradoxes, and they might actually be something that can help us in the end. How can we be more effective in dealing with these tensions or even using them to our benefit? Our guest, who has been researching this for over 20 years, is Dr. Marianne Lewis. She is the dean and professor of management of the Lindner College of Business, University of Cincinnati. She is a thought leader in organizational paradoxes and among the world’s top 1% most cited researchers in her field. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [4:59] What is “both/and” thinking? “Either/or” thinking tends to be our default. We experience tension or a dilemma, weigh the pros and cons, make a decision, and move on. That’s the default because it makes us feel like we have control, clarity, and consistency in our decision-making. “Either/or” thinking is a potentially detrimental approach because it’s limited to a binary, not considering other possibilities. Often in innovation, I see the false dilemma, “Are we focused on today’s products or are we focused on bold, new innovation?” If we only do one or the other, we soon hit a real challenge, because those two behaviors feed each other. “Both/and” thinking is about seeing tensions as opportunities for learning, creativity, and growth rather than paralyzing moments when you must make a call. Instead of thinking about tradeoffs, think about a paradox. I picture the yin yang. One side is the bread-and-butter current products, and one side is the bold, new innovations. The current products fund radical R&D, and new innovations become our core products. See current and new products as two parts of a bigger hole and as a persistent tension. [9:33] How have you seen organizations deal with the tension between tactical work and strategic work? We studied product design firms in Silicon Valley, which were incredibly financially successful. You might assume all their work is radical product development, but they pay their bills by doing version 2.0 of a phone or a mouse. We found the tension between three different levels—strategy, team, and individual. At the strategy level, these firms were really good at thinking about their project portfolio and making sure they always had a mix of incremental projects that pay the bills and projects that were potential award-winning showcase projects. They didn’t need many showcase projects, and when they didn’t have enough they would start their own. At the individual designer level, they would rotate designers among different projects. If they kept designers on incremental projects, the designers would feel they weren’t actually doing design, but if they kept designers on only the showcase projects, the designers would think about it 24/7 and get burned out. After some time on a showcase project, a designer needed to be on an incremental project to hone their skills and rebuild their confidence. These firms fostered the identity of practical artist in their designers. They helped people feel good about both types of projects. As another example, the chief digital officer of Fifth Third Bank told me, “If I’m not careful, urgency will always, always, always push out creativity and innovation.” I asked her what she does about that, and she said she needs people hitting the targets, and at the same time she needs to compartmentalize. Some companies compartmentalize using micro-sabbaticals—taking a day or two in a month for a new project—while others do job rotation. Resolving the paradox between tactical and strategic work means carving out time or creating different spaces. That could mean different teams, or it could mean an innovation center that’s physically a different building. The point is to make it intentional. If not, the urgency will push out the bold. [15:46] How do we put “both/and” thinking into practice? We think about is as a system of tools. We use the ABCD framework: Assumptions Boundaries Comfort Dynamics [16:18] Assumptions How do we change the question we’re asking? A psychology expert at Stanford said, “The problem is not the problem. The problem is the way we think about the problem.” As soon as we frame our problem as a question, we have constraints. When you say, “Do I focus on my current products or do I focus on what’s big and new?” you’ve dichotomized it rather than asking, “How could we accommodate the new and the old?” There are lots of ways you could ask that questions. Your assumptions are going to limit the way you think. You must question your assumptions and reframe your question. [18:52] Boundaries Separating and connecting means recognizing that the cons of one approach are the pros of another and vice versa. Respect both sides of opposing options. Find ways to connect them. For example, LEGO almost went into bankruptcy because they had gone on an innovation, product-development binge. They had lost all of their cost controls and quality controls. They realized they had to put some guardrails up while keeping their bold, innovative approach. They built some guardrails and decided to innovate within boundaries. By doing that, they became more creative. They decided to use fewer specialty bricks, and designers become more innovative under constraints. [20:58] Comfort This is about emotions and finding comfort in the discomfort. People don’t typically like that feeling of tension. How do you sit with discomfort and work through it. Paul Polman, when he was turning around Unilever, said, “When you bring me a problem and you tell me, ‘Here’s our solution,’ I’m going to tell you, ‘Go bring me back another and make sure it’s almost the opposite.'”  He said that tensions provide creative friction, and he wanted as much creative friction on the table as possible. By doing that, he was trying to build comfort into Unilever, helping people be comfortable with the feeling of tension, because it’s necessary to have good, creative, cost-efficient, scalable, and recognized products. [24:05] Dynamics Organizations and leaders who are really good at managing tensions see this as a journey. They know they’re going to keep adjusting the boundaries with the understanding that they are going to keep experimenting. The opportunity that comes out of tensions is learning. We have to recognize we’re walking a tightrope. A tightrope walker has a clear view of where they’re going, but they’re making these micro-shifts all along the way. You should move forward but also make micro-shifts because some days you have to have your quarterly earnings reported, and some days you’re going to aim for the stars and make a big splash because you have the opportunity, but the guardrails help you not lean so far you fall off the tightrope. Which foot you lean on is going to depend quite a bit on the situations you’re currently facing. [27:24] Can you provide an example of using the ABCD framework? When Paul Polman took over Unilever (personal product company), the company was failing. He posed a question most of the leaders wouldn’t have put as the primary question. He decided the question was, “How can we increase our profitability through social responsibility?” He felt one of the key challenges in the fast-moving consumer product group was sustainability and environmental impact. While some people felt there was a tension between social responsibility and fiscal responsibility, Polman changed this view. For each innovation question, he wanted his team to list, on one side of a sheet of paper, how they would grow market share, increase revenue, and decrease costs. On the other side of the sheet, they should list how they would reduce water, pollution, transportation costs, and packaging and involve the local community. He was separating by building two sides of a ledger and connecting those sides around something he called the Unilever Sustainable Living Plan. The mission was to make a more sustainable world starting with people’s lives. They touched 2 billion consumers a day, and their goal was in 10 years to double their profits and halve their environmental footprint. People thought Polman was crazy, but he achieved his goal in 10 years and set a model for multi-national corporations. Action Guide: Put the information Marianne shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links: Check out Both/And Thinking Learn more about Marianne and “both/and” thinking on her website Innovation Quote “The problem is not the problem. The problem is the way we think about the problem.” 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 organizations can empower product managers Today we are talking about what a product-led organization is, barriers that can prevent an organization from being product-led, and actions to create the product-led organization. Our guest is Paul Ortchanian, a problem-solver by nature and founder of Bain Public. He has a great deal of experience that has helped him be well-rounded in product management. Paul acquired the breadth of experience through his leadership roles at San Francisco Bay Area startups and high-growth companies. He helps rapidly scaling early-stage startups craft their Product Strategy and everything related to it. He also helps middle market and scrappy companies generate new product strategies for significant, sustainable growth.  Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:35] What does it mean to be a product-led organization? When I was interviewing product managers, I realized most of them had spent only a year or a year an half at each of several organizations. I eventually got fired as a product manager. I wondered why product managers last such a short time at each organization. If the leadership team doesn’t have a good understanding of how to engage with a product manager and what to expect from them, then any reason is enough reason to move on and find someone else. The second you have friction with the IT team or the engineering team, you’re going to be in trouble. Product managers often end up in organizations where they’re not being empowered. The leadership team is not giving them the guidance, process, tools, and support needed to do product management the way we all want to do it. Often, product managers move from one company to the other seeking the elusive product-led organization. The product-led organization comes from the leadership team creating space for product managers to do their jobs right. [4:32] Does empowering product managers require an organization to be structured around product? Not really. It comes down to making sure there is a product leadership team. Usually that’s the same as the regular leadership team. Product managers have to pitch initiatives to the leadership team, which makes decision on what to put their money toward. I noticed when I left San Francisco and went to cities like New York City, Montreal, and London, that these cities don’t have the heritage of product management. Leadership teams have often worked in service organizations or organizations that don’t have digital products, so they don’t know how to engage with a product manager. It’s not uncommon to realize your chief sales officer doesn’t understand that everything has to go through the product manager for prioritization, and they’ll just go straight to the CEO or engineers. As a product manager, you’ll feel like you have to create order within all of this. You might feel stuck managing your product while also trying to train the leadership team to understand how to work with you and adopt processes and correct behaviors. The job of a product manager is hard enough without having to establish a process. If you try to put in a process, often you get fired for not doing your job. A lot of product managers either accept they’re in the wrong type of organization that isn’t product-led or they decide to leave. As a product manager, you want to be in an organization where the leadership team is empowering product managers. [9:21] What have you seen are some of the issues that make it difficult to create a product-led organization? Often there’s a lack of awareness of product management. Often different teams don’t have a collective understanding of how to work with a product team. Road mapping is a collaborative effort, but the product, sales, and marketing teams might all be working in different ways. Awareness at the leadership level needs to be there for teams to understand they’re not working with product managers in the most efficient way and they need to fix that. Often product managers think they’re doing a great job creating value for the customer, but the business might not be getting as much value. For example, the marketing team might not support the features that the product team has just delivered through the engineers. You need to make sure there is buy-in from all stakeholders. I find that companies need a third party to come in and ask, “How do you hire and fire your product managers?” I want to hear it from marketing, sales, the CEO, and the CFO. Everyone needs to agree with how they’re going to engage with product managers and teams. You need to make sure there is a process and tools in place that people agree on. As a product manager, you’re the glue of the organization that is supposed to tie all these different groups together, but you can’t force them to engage and work with you if they don’t think it’s part of their job definition to engage with you. That agreement needs to come from the top down. [12:59] Where have you seen product teams getting pushed out of cross-functional collaboration? Often the sales team does not want the product team to be part of customer meetings. The sales team has a lot of anecdotes from customers, but if the product team is not allowed to have a conversation with those customers, how are they going to learn? I’ve seen situations when the sales team thinks they’re running a service organization. They don’t say no. They say yes to everything the customer asks. Soon the product is just an extension of a service offering where anything the customer wants the customer gets, and value isn’t being created. We worked with one company in the AI space. They had a team working on AI algorithms, and the sales team would send any situation a customer encountered to the team, which would come up with an algorithm. It ended up being a very service-oriented business. In this situation, I recommend the sales team start offering discounts. They can say, “I’m sorry, but this feature currently isn’t in our product, but it is on our roadmap. It’s going to be ready in a year. If you really want to work with us, we’re willing to give you a 30% discount on the product. You can use the product without the feature, and within a year it will be there. If you don’t want to wait that long, we have a professional services team that could custom-build the feature, but if we do that you will not benefit from the support-and-upgrade gravy train. If we build this feature for you, it will cost 10 times the price. We’re willing to give you engineering credits for $300,000, but the total cost is $ 1 million.” Tell the sales team they can sell the product as-is with a rebate or they can sell professional services and give some credits away but for 10 times the price. They’ll realize there’s no such thing as saying yes. There are only options to offer. If the client is crazy enough to pay 10 times the price, that’s good for the company as well. This method also allows the product team to see the motivations of the customer. They might say a feature is a must-have, but when the sales team throws in a discount, it becomes a wishlist item. [19:55] What steps can a Product Leader (VP or CPO) take to help create a product-led organization? I ask the product team to go to leadership and ask them for the deck that they’re been preparing quarterly for the board. Any VC-backed startup has a deck they need to show on a quarterly basis to the board members. That’s the high-level strategy for the company. That’s everything product managers need to know in order to say yes or no to whatever the sales or marketing team forces on them. It’s a forecast of the strategy. We do a six-six-six exercise, where we ask leaders what features they’re going to build in the next six weeks, six months, and six years. You can’t express the features you’re going to build in six years as features, but you can express strategy, tactics, and metrics. These are the kinds of things in that deck. If the leadership team is closed to the idea of the product team seeing that deck, I would say get away and go somewhere else. That’s not the type of environment that will allow the product team to thrive. If they are willing to share it, that’s the first step toward an understanding. Because those decks are created on a quarterly basis, you can go back to the leadership team and ask for the latest version of the deck to see what has changed. You can also use that deck to communicate strategy to sales and marketing teams. Action Guide: Put the information Paul shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links: Learn more about Bain Public Read the article “How to Align Stakeholders from Different Departments on a Product Roadmap. Speaking with Paul Ortchanian, CEO, Bain Public” Get the free ebook Essential Ingredients to Reach Your Product Goals Connect with Paul on LinkedIn Innovation Quote “Work should be organized, things should be managed, but people can only be encouraged, inspired, and led.” – Paul Ortchanian 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

The steps in ranking and valuing Jobs-to-be-Done—for product managers We have talked a few times about Jobs-to-be-Done in past episodes. It is a customer discovery tool for uncovering the unmet needs of customers—the tasks they want to complete or objectives they want to achieve. When using this approach, we may find the customer has multiple Jobs-to-be-Done and each job has a variety of attributes. We then need to know what is most important to tackle first. Our guest has an approach for ranking and valuing jobs to be done. His name is Doug Stone. He is an expert at leading human-centric innovation and product design projects. His work has informed over $1 billion in revenue growth for Fortune 100 companies. He has a Masters of Product Design and Development from Northwestern University and teaches Innovation Strategy internationally. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [6:03] Can you give an example illustrating why ranking and valuing Jobs-to-be-Done is important? We did a project for a large quick-service restaurant about breakfast and came back with 20-25 unmet needs a quick-service breakfast can satisfy. After testing them and understanding which brands a consumer would want to satisfy each job, we found the second most important job to be done in quick-service breakfast was owned by a competitor, and it had to do with feeling strong, competent, and capable. My client’s brand attributes were more around wholesomeness, fun, and casualness. It was important to have those additional criteria around the Jobs-to-be-Done. We recommended the first five most important Jobs-to-be-Done, and as a grouping they aligned with their brand accurately. They developed communications and promotional ideas and reversed a three-year decline in their books. The grouping of Jobs-to-be-Done from the marketplace is really influenced by the brand the company has and what’s most important to consumers. As another example, we were working with health insurance companies. We collected Jobs-to-be-Done that people wanted in healthcare. That collection process grabbed jobs that health insurance companies are responsible for and jobs healthcare providers are responsible for. We had to pull those jobs apart. We asked consumers, “Which brand do you want to solve this?” One of our health insurance clients had a very different brand characteristic from most health insurance companies. We asked, “Do you want a health insurance company to solve this?” For certain jobs, consumers said no. Then we asked, “Do you want this specific health insurance brand to solve it?” and consumers said yes. That gave us a good understanding of what to bring into ideation and how to show a deep partnership between the health insurance company and the healthcare provider that was very believable for the client. [10:32] Take us through your Jobs-to-be-Done ranking and valuing approach. When you do qualitative interviews to get the Jobs-to-be-Done, use a cognitive framework to organize the discussion guide. For example, a financial services company told us their consumers wanted control. Control is too high level of an unmet need for a Job-to-be-Done. When you look at control theory from a cognitive perspective, it has three components: a point a reference, sensitivity to that point of reference, and real and imagined levers that people pull to get closer to or further from that point of reference. We used that cognitive model in the discussion guide. Once you have a transcript, pull out pieces of the transcript that have to do with people’s actions, the reasons they’re doing things, and the tensions they feel. Go through a diverge-converge process. We’ve been able to use artificial intelligence to do much of this, but currently we do this as a workshop with clients. Arrange the actions, reasons, and tensions into “because…but” statements. For example, “I eat fast food because it’s convenient, but I worry it’s bad for my health,” or “I eat fast food because it’s affordable, but I worry about its impact on the food chain.” Those are very different “because…but” statements with different reasons and tensions. Once you’ve collected those statements, categorize them into emotionally-based categories and refine them down to ones your business can actually do something about. Next create a linguistic prototype, which is very formatted, and I have a checker that allows you to make sure you have formatted it properly. Find the jobs that are most important that your company can do the most to solve. Then quantitatively test them. We use a Likert scale. Ask whether consumers agree with the full statement and whether they agree with the action, reason, and tension separately. Then flip the tension into a positive statement: “Do you want this benefit delivered by this brand or industry?” Finally, ask, “Is this tension becoming more or less important to you?” Use a weighted scale and add up the responses into a power score. Now you can easily identify which jobs are most important. Aggregate jobs together. It’s helpful to test how different segments rank jobs. You’ll need to meet a couple of Jobs-to-be-Done that are important to everyone and a couple of jobs that are important to the segments really key to your growth. This allows you to create very good market fit. When you test your concepts, you should refer back to these jobs and ask, “Does the way we solved it satisfy that tension, that Job-to-be-Done for your customer?” [18:19] Whom do you interview? Often we interview users and influencers. We did a project for an academic testing company who believed the student was their customer. When we did our preliminary interview, we realized the parent had a huge influence on the student and their education, so we recommended they segment both the parents and students. We found out there was a student-parent type combination that was ideal for the business. We interviewed students and parents and found the company could influence certain parent types and students types into being a better type for the company. It’s important to talk to a group of consumers that are valuable to the growth of your company, not just talk to everyone. However, do test with everybody. When you talk to key users and test the Jobs-to-be-Done across a broad consumer base, you can see the rankings shift. For example, we did a project with a veterinary pet insurance company. This was in the heyday of the media’s talking about “fur babies.” Consumers are getting married later, having children later, and treating animals like people. The veterinary pet insurance company was convinced the market for their product was growing exponentially and they needed to have benefits that were much more similar to human health insurance, because that’s what they would hear from adamant users. When we talked to those users, we heard they would do anything for their “fur babies.” When we tested those Jobs-to-be-Done across the general population, there was no value in them. We went back to the drawing board and interviewed other people. We found their Jobs-to-be-Done were around not being emotionally drawn into spending their life savings on a procedure for an animal that will only live 12 years anyway. The organization’s business model changed to developing a more information-based vet benchmarking, cost-based product they sold to companies as a worker benefit. [25:07] How are you using AI to enable a faster process? At a workshop, we have 400-500 cards each with two or three sentences a consumer actually said. Participants read through them all then sit down and yell out categories they’ve seen. We get about 10 categories. Then we get up, take the cards off the wall, and bucket them into categories. This is a great empathy exercise for clients, but it’s not worth the time. AI is able to extract the statements and categorize them. We’ve used transformation engines to pull out the actions, reasons, and tensions. Then, humans make the “because…but” statements, since we’re not quite there yet with AI. Action Guide: Put the information Doug shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links: Visit DriveStrategy.com Connect with Doug on LinkedIn Check out Bob Moesta’s The Jobs-to-be-Done Handbook Innovation Quote “You can’t just give someone a creativity injection. You need to create an environment of curiosity and a way in which to bring out their best.” – Sir Ken Robinson 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 and marketing teams can work together Today we are talking about the interdependence of product and marketing and how marketing trends have changed. To help us, Ali Plonchak is with us. Ali is the COO of Crossmedia. Since 2006 at Crossmedia, she has helped clients navigate the changing marketing landscape. As the company’s first female partner, she proudly leads the agency to deliver on its mission of trust, reason, and happiness every day. Her responsibilities include building and evolving Crossmedia’s services in ways that reflect their commitment to do the right things for their people and their clients.  Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [5:53] What is the definition or purpose of marketing? Marketing, when done well, delivers on a need a consumer didn’t realize they had. It’s about using data to uncover insights and the best place, time, and way to speak to a consumer on behalf of a brand. Then deliver that in an effective way and measure the success of that against brand goals. [7:14] What trends or big shifts have you seen in marketing? Access to data and how we use it has changed. Data, digital media, and advanced analytics to measure effectiveness have skyrocketed. Everything from smartphones to social media has allowed there to be more data out there. It created a lot more complexity in the supply and demand of digital advertising inventory and pricing mechanisms. Now, you can track advertising exposure all the way through to the brand’s ultimate success measure. Now, success in marketing is not only about the brand, values, and whom you want to reach, but also about having technical acumen. Another trend is data enrichment. You can pay a data service to get data on your customers. A few years ago, there was suddenly all this data on people, but there started to be questions about how the data is being sourced, how recent it is, and what its quality is. There’s been a big shift in the past couple of years for organizations to maintain a centralized source of data and know with more clarity how that data was procured and how it applies to audiences. This year, there’s a ton of new legislation that will continually impact the type of data that consumers willingly give to a website. That’s sparking a lot of interesting innovation in the way we target advertising and measure effectiveness. Another shift is around using media responsibly. Consumers are starting to recognize the societal impact media can have on consumers—positive or negative. How can we think about using media for good? That’s a conversation we’re frequently having with our clients. How can we use media to deliver positive actions? How can we stay away from some of the places and spaces that might be impacting people in a more negative context? [13:42] Have you seen any shifts from outbound (getting information to people, e.g., billboard, advertisement) to inbound (people coming to you, e.g., on social media) marketing? Absolutely, and that’s related to having so much more data out there. Most consumers expect if they engage with your brand, you will provide them something of value. It could be functional—if they sign up for your email list, you provide 20% off their first purchase. Or it could be something cool—you provide a branded filter they can apply on a social media platform. Most of these interactions allow marketers to find consumers who are “hand raisers” for their brands. They can then look for more people who raise their hands like that, finding the attributes that are common to hand raisers and using those to fuel everything from advertising to product development. [15:14] How is changing legislation impacting marketing? This legislation impacts the way we target advertising and the way we measure effectiveness. Marketers now can’t use some of the data they’ve gotten accustomed to using. This is creating a renaissance of tactics that were widely used before the rise of so much data. For example, one strategy is to target consumers in the right context. If they’re in a grocery store, it makes sense to be advertising food content. [17:02] Can you give an example of newer measurements? Early digital advertising was all about click-through rate and cost per click. Then everybody realized there can be a lot of fraud in the advertising landscape, and it was hard to define the meaning of some measurements. The industry has become more sophisticated around measuring the ultimate business success, answering, “Did an advertisement drive an ultimate business transaction for a brand?” A good portion of those technologies relied on cookies, which are going away. Now we’re seeing the rise of first-party data. Collecting phone numbers or having loyalty cards allows marketing to be tracked back to the purchases. [21:53] How are marketing and product innovation interrelated? Advertising, social media, and communications can provide insights for new products. For example, Stranger Things is doing an integration with the clothing company Gap and pulling those products into advertising. IKEA realized people love their meatballs, so they marketed IKEA with the creation of a meatball-scented candle. The line between product and advertising is blurring, and what used to be a linear flow from product to advertising is becoming a two-way connection. [24:19] What problems have you seen with siloed organizations and a lack of communication between product and marketing? One thing that keeps me up at night is figuring out how to continue to deliver scale but also really maintain the integration between product and marketing. Countless times we’ve been ready to launch a campaign and ask the client, “When somebody clicks on this ad, where do you want them to go?” and somebody on the other end says, “I’m not really sure. We’ll have to get back to you on that.” The end goal is to make the experience seamless for the consumer. When they see something really great in advertising and don’t actually land somewhere to take the next action, that experience falls completely flat. We’ve also had retail clients whose advertising is great and drives traffic into the stores, but when the customers get there the store doesn’t have the product they are looking for. This has especially been a challenge as retailers have encountered supply chain issues, but these problems have driven some integration between marketing and retail. Action Guide: Put the information Ali shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful link: Connect with Ali on LinkedIn Innovation Quotes “And it’s much bigger issues in the world I know, but I first had to take care of the world I know.” – Jay-Z “If nothing changes, nothing changes.” – Ali’s spin instructor 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 for product managers from PDMA’s Outstanding Corporate Innovators Award Every year the Product Management and Development Association (PDMA) recognizes an organization with the Outstanding Corporate Innovators Award (OCI). Hershey, the chocolate maker, was the last winner, in 2022. The winners of the award can teach us valuable lessons about innovation. To help us learn some of those lessons, Sally Kay is with us. She has served on PDMA’s OCI Committee for several years. Sally spent 36 years with The Dow Chemical Company and GlaxoSmithKline Consumer Healthcare. After working in R&D, Finance, Sales, and Marketing she focused her career on various areas of innovation and new product development. Since retiring, Sally has started her own consulting business, Strategic Product Development, which focuses on the front end of the innovation process.  Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [3:04] Why was the OCI award created? OCI was created as a learning vehicle for PDMA. When a company achieves a sustained and quantifiable innovation success, PDMA will give them an award if the company will present their lessons learned at the annual conference. The OCI committee uses a rigorous process to evaluate candidates, focusing on identifying unique practices that will provide valuable learning opportunities for others trying to improve their innovation practices. We look under the hood of these companies to learn how they are sustaining innovation success. [5:05] What is required to compete for the OCI award? There are three primary criteria: Sustained success launching significant new products or services Significant quantifiable business results delivered by those new products or services Consistent use of disciplined product development practices that the company is willing to share with others We provide detailed feedback to companies that don’t win the award. Many companies find this valuable, and some later win the award after adapting their practices to reflect what they learned from us. [9:40] What are key innovation practices that winners have in common? The award started in 1988, and in 2004 the OCI committee was asked to write a chapter for the PDMA Handbook of New Product Development about the OCI award. We found consistency in the winners’ practices that others competing did not have. Even though these companies were diverse in industry, size, and geography, their practices were consistent. How they executed those practices depended on their industry and culture. We conducted two more retrospective analyses covering 2004-2013 and 2014-2021. We saw an evolution of the practices that separated the winners, but we still saw that consistency of practices across the winners. We learned that achieving innovation success has not gotten easier over the 35 years of the OCI award. From 1988-2004, winners were early adopters of Stage-Gate, cross-functional teams, and voice-of-the-customer. Today, the practices that differentiate OCI winners are much more complex and involve: innovation strategy that defines where the company is going to play and how they are going to win intense focus on the front end of the innovation process portfolio optimization external collaboration and open innovation culture that supports bold thinking, risk-taking, and failure Lean and Agile practices metrics to measure effectiveness of the innovation process strong corporate commitment to innovation [18:07] Do you have any favorite innovation practices you’d like to talk more about? Innovation strategy is critical. The company Corning was once very dependent on the telecom industry. In the early 2000’s, that industry started to decline, and Corning almost shut its doors. Instead, their management decided to totally change their approach to innovation and make sure they were never dependent on just one industry again. One of their key tactics was to develop an innovation strategy. They call it their innovation recipe. It clearly defines the key elements of achieving successful innovation. One of those elements is solving a significant customer problem. When I visited Corning, it didn’t matter whether we were visiting engineering, marketing, or sales—everybody could quote the innovation strategy. They all knew that was critical to their success. Intense front-end focus is also important. We look for companies that are really digging deep at the front end of the innovation process and getting as many inputs as they can to make a decision on where they’re going to innovate. The company Church & Dwight showed us a funnel where they determine their “drill sites”—where to focus their innovation efforts. The funnel has 25 different inputs to determine where the big opportunities are. That’s intense front-end focus, and it tends to be skipped sometimes. [21:48] How do winners resource front-end innovation? Corning has a discovery process called Magellan. It starts with workshops, and they bring in people from all kinds of industries—energy, economy, etc.—who share what trends are going on now. Marketing and technical people sit in on those workshops, which happen every two years or so. The technical and marketing teams come up with insights from those meetings that might be new opportunities for the company. They have a process for putting a business case together, evaluating it, and moving forward. Another example is Novazymes, a biotech company, which created their own crowdsourcing platform for their employees. When an employee put out an idea, other people could jump in on the internet and contribute ideas. They had tremendous success. It was voluntary, but people really wanted to participate. Some companies also collaborate with external sources to solve problems. [26:33] How do winners manage portfolio optimization? Companies are becoming more disciplined in portfolio optimization. They don’t have enough resources for all the projects and really have to prioritize. Winners come up with tools to evaluate projects based on critical criteria. They bring in diverse perspectives from manufacturing, sales, and marketing, and consider those perspectives against established criteria like time to market or significance of the problem being solved. Winners talk about the need to balance between incremental, adjacent, and disruptive projects. Incremental projects take the fewest resources and least time, but the disruptive projects lead transformation in the industry. You can’t neglect disruptive projects. When the company BD won, we were impressed that they had been in the same business for years then suddenly realized they should be looking at new opportunities. They started going outside their core business. First they put together a strategy for going outside the core and determined how to resource those projects. It’s important to talk to the customer. A gentleman from 3M told us the customer has become the force majeure more today than ever before. Customer dynamics have been changing rapidly, so it’s critical that you talk to your customer constantly. Action Guide: Put the information Sally shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links: Watch the PDMA Webcast: Lessons Learned from Outstanding Corporate Innovators Learn more about the OCI Award Listen to the 2021 and 2010 Lessons Learned from OCI Check out The PDMA Handbook of New Product Development 2nd or 3rd edition PDMA Handbook, 3rd ed: https://www.amazon.com/PDMA-Handbook-New-Product-Development/dp/0470648201 PDMA Handbook, 2nd ed: https://www.amazon.com/PDMA-Handbook-Product-Development-Second/dp/B003RCNWK8 Connect with Sally Kay on LinkedIn Innovation Quote “Our company moved from an NIH (Not Invented Here) philosophy to a PFE (Proudly Found Elsewhere) philosophy for innovation.” – from a DSM Executive describing their commitment to open innovation  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 give their products momentum to get across the finish line Identifying the strategies that accelerate innovation starts with the question: “What do the world’s best innovation teams do differently?” To find the answer, we are talking with Matt Phillips, who interviewed over 100 new product innovation leaders, identifying six key strategies they use to cut through bureaucracy, find winning ideas sooner, and improve their success rate at launch.  Matt is the founder of Phillips & Co., a Chicago-based innovation strategy firm. The company’s team of researchers, strategists, and inventors helps organizations reimagine their future and invent new products, services, and brands. Matt has an interesting educational background, with an MBA in Marketing from The Kellogg School of Management. He also graduated from the Conservatory Program in Improvisation at The Second City in Chicago. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [4:08] After interviewing 100 product and innovation leaders, you identified six key strategies that improve innovation. Can you take us through those? As a consultant, I’ve seen that the biggest challenge has been projects that grind to a halt or fade away. If you could speed things up, that momentum would get more projects to the finish line. The six strategies: [4:46] Question the question. A company called A. Y. McDonald, which makes plumbing parts for city waterworks, wanted us to help them invent new products. At the kickoff, we asked what their last breakthrough product was. They told us about a valve that came out in the late sixties. If you run a public water system, the last thing you want is a newfangled product—you want the same reliable product over and over. At our first meeting, we suggested we reframe what A. Y. McDonald had hired us to do. Instead of answering, “What new products can we create?” we could answer the basic question, “How do we make more money?” We worked on answering both questions at the same time. Most of the successes were non-product successes around marketing, distribution, and user experience.  Eventually we got to products, but knowing there was an extreme uphill battle, we decided to question the question. If you’re handed a challenge by the product team, CEO, or customer, first step back and ask, “Is that even the right question to work on?” That accelerates things because often teams spend months or years on a question that many people on the team know isn’t even the right question. [8:10] Build dream teams. Walt Mossberg asked Steve Jobs, “How do you turn out such amazing products at Apple?” He said, “Walt, do you know how many committees we have at Apple? Zero.” Apple was organized like a startup. Every product had a team built and dedicated to work on it. After a class I taught at Kellogg, one of the students who had worked at Apple told me an interesting story about the team that ran the software Garage Band, which allows you to record different musical instruments and piece them together into a finished song. The team in charge of Garage Band was four people who happened to play four different instruments, so not only were they great software engineers and leaders, but they were also musicians—a drummer, keyboardist, guitarist, and singer. When one of those four people left Apple, instead of finding a replacement who was just really great at the role they needed filled, they found someone who was great at the role and played the instrument that was missing. There was a synergy in having the four of them not only be software engineers but also be musicians. Companies that accelerate innovation have thought hard about their teams. They haven’t just cobbled them together. They’ve spent time finding the exact right people. [12:11] Consistently query customers. Many organizations rev up for innovation, do a giant market study for six months, go off and work with those insights for the next three years, and never talk to customers again. This sounds insane, but it’s very common. The company Radio Flyer was in financial straits. They realized they hadn’t done any work around insights or understanding their customer. They were making the metal red wagon, and competitors were coming in with plastic wagons that looked a whole lot like theirs. They went on a listening tour and found out that people had this huge emotional sense of nostalgia for the Radio Flyer wagon and for the Radio Flyer tricycle. What was fascinating about that was that they had never made a tricycle in their history, but people had this huge nostalgia for these non-existent tricycles. Customers had apparently merged their childhood memories. The first thing Radio Flyer did was make a tricycle, and it became a smash. After that they built a constant listening mechanism. They could go back on a regular basis and talk to customers, show them prototypes, and share ideas. This turned into a string of hit products. They eventually made bicycles and e-bikes. They wanted a better battery, so they reached out to Tesla, and Tesla gave them the battery technology and asked Radio Flyer to make a kid-sized Tesla. All these things came from listening to their customers and querying them on a regular basis. [15:19] Thrive like a beehive. A beehive has a queen bee (the leader) and a bunch of workers. The workers work efficiently by not only working internally but also leaving the beehive often to get pollen and nectar. This is a metaphor for infusing new insights. You could call it open innovation, but it could be even more casual than that—Google searches, calling the local university professor, calling up the Food Network star who is working on recipes just like that chocolate bar your company is working on. Constantly reach outside the walls of your hive. A gentleman who had spent years as a film writer in Hollywood told me a story. After 9/11 the CIA faced a big problem: figuring out what the next attack might be. Brilliantly, the CIA left their beehive and went to the most creative place they could think of—Hollywood. Not long after 9/11, they convened a secret meeting with some of the top writers in Hollywood who had worked on terrorism or CIA movies. They asked, “If you had to plan the next one, what would it be?” The writers overwhelmed the CIA with horrible plots, but that allowed the CIA to start to build mechanisms to look for those things and think about how they might play out in the future. It’s a great example of leaving your four walls and looking for feedback. [18:47] Paint the picture. My friend Jeff was working for a large financial services company, and they wanted him to help figure out how to make their call center better. They found the time it took to set up a new account was pretty long. If a company of 75 people wanted to set up a program with the financial services company, every single one of their 75 employees had to type in the name of the company and the address again. There was no way to copy that across all the different records. There had been previous attempters to fix this, but the financial services company had a 20-step process to officially start a program to fix it. Throughout the process, it took 25 people to say yes and only one person to say no. Jeff opened a PowerPoint and mapped out what the final improved process would look like. He took existing screenshots and modified them with crude PowerPoint boxes, showing all the steps in the process. He started taking his PowerPoint around to one or two people at a time and said, “If this were the final product, would this work?” They made suggestions and Jeff made changes then took it out again. He didn’t fill out any paperwork. He never built an official team. He just created the finished product. He painted the picture right away, tweaked that picture, and eventually got the thing built in six months. [22:13] Cultivate a yes, and culture. The idea of yes, and is if you’re leading an improv scene, say “Yes, and…” to anything that’s handed to you. If Chad says, “I can’t believe we’re trapped inside of a toaster,” and I say, “What are you talking about? We’re on a podcast right now,” the scene falls apart. But if I say, “No kidding, I should have worn my boots. My feet are on fire,” then the scene moves forward. Most people have experienced yes, and as a brainstorming tool, but we’ve reframed it as an aspect of culture. If you start every sentence with “No, but…” it’s terrible. Instead, if you start every sentence with “Yes, and…” the conversation flows much more logically. All the little moments when you hear “No, but,” and feel like you’re being rejected or your ideas aren’t worth listening to create a culture where people keep ideas to themselves. In a yes, and culture, everyone can take any idea or crazy question that’s handed to them and immediately accept it as a valid idea and build on top of it. The Swedish company Eleiko is the leading maker of weightlifting weights, used in the Olympics and World Championships. The company has been around about a hundred years, and they started out making waffle irons. In 1957, one of the plant managers who was a weightlifter told the owner, “The waffle irons are basically like weights. If we put them in a different shape, they can be weightlifting weights.” The CEO of the time said, “That sounds great. Let’s go make some.” That seemed like a natural no, but moment, but today they are the leading maker of weightlifting weights in the world. Action Guide: Put the information Matt shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links: Learn more about Phillips & Co. Follow Phillips & Co. on LinkedIn Innovation Quote “Before you try to increase your willpower, try to decrease the friction in your environment.” – James Clear 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 prepare for a product leadership role Today we are talking about how you can prepare for and find a senior product leadership role, and we’ll be addressing this both for current senior leaders as well as for product managers. To help us, we are joined by the co-founder of an executive search firm that specializes in placing Product VPs and CPOs. Our guest is Chris Mason, who started Intelligent People in 2002 as a specialized recruitment agency. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:20] What do you love about your role helping people land senior product leadership roles and helping organizations find the talent they need? Organizations approach us and give us insight into their strategies and what they’re looking to achieve. It’s really exciting to see what their strategies are and help them figure out the profiles of people who will solve their problems. We also get close to candidates and understand where they are in their careers and what challenges they’re looking for next. We change their lives when there’s a strong match—the candidate gets the opportunity they want and we solve the business’s problems. [3:56] What are organizations looking for in a Product VP or Chief Product Officer (CPO)? There are lot of variables, and it depends on the challenges the organization has. Usually organizations are looking for some relevant domain knowledge or experience relevant to the problem. Product leaders need skills like using data, prioritizing, managing a team, strategic thinking, and influencing. It’s critical for Product VPs and CPOs to be able to articulate the value behind a business case and get people on board. They should think about the full product lifecycle, asking, “What is the purpose of this? What value are we creating? What problem are we solving?” There’s an ongoing debate about the importance of domain knowledge and how transferrable product skills are. I think skills can be really transferable with some exceptions. No one piece of work is the same, but there are common themes that start to rise to the front for product leaders. [7:41] Do you have any more thoughts about domain knowledge? We try to shift the conversation with the company to discussing what impact they’re looking for. What problem are they solving with this hire? Then we look at the candidate pool. How realistic is it we’re going to find this person? We try to focus more on competencies and experience rather than domain knowledge, because domain knowledge can be learned relatively quickly. We try to increase the size of the candidate pool by getting the client to look more broadly at other domains. Often product leaders want a different challenge by moving to a new sector. Often a person coming from outside the domain has an advantage because they don’t make the same assumptions everyone in the industry makes. [11:14] How can a person looking for a Product VP or CPO role best position themselves? There’s some hygiene stuff at the beginning: Get your CV and LinkedIn profile ready and make sure they’re well aligned. You can apply through an agency, but you can also use your network. Continually keep your LinkedIn updated, so you’re not raising any red flags if your current boss sees you suddenly update your LinkedIn profile, and so you’re discoverable based on your content. Change your profile to “open to work” when the time is right to make yourself even more discoverable. Write your resume to highlight your impacts. Write about what you’ve achieved. Attach data and metrics. Reflect on what’s going to make you happy. Make sure you’re targeting the sort of challenge you’re looking for. Some times people get promoted to the point where they’re no longer happy. It takes a lot of self-awareness to answer, “What will make me happy? What sort of challenge am I looking for?” At the start of your search, reflect on that. Think about the things you enjoy the most and the things you don’t enjoy and what sort of opportunity will tick the boxes of the things you enjoy the most. Try getting a mentor because that person can uncover things that aren’t obvious to you. [18:06] What kind of experience should product managers be looking for to prepare themselves for a future Product VP role? Be continually learning. Do training, read books, and join a community. There are a lot of product management communities, like Chad’s Product Mastery Now Community, that you can get involved in. It’s really valuable for product managers and leaders to be able to share stories and bounce ideas off other people. Take opportunities to learn. Be willing to take on more responsibility, even if it’s for a small initiative and you can’t see the rewards right away, because the rewards will follow when you build experience. [21:42] What’s your outlook on the 2023 job market? Up until last summer has been the busiest 18 months I’ve ever seen. We’ve had a boom time coming out of COVID lockdowns, and we’re trying to figure out what the new normal is. Big tech overexpanded and overhired. Now large enterprise organizations have had to make some cuts, so we’re seeing more supply in the labor market. We’re still seeing lots of opportunities. The digital world is growing. Heritage businesses are transforming and new ideas are being funded. I wouldn’t say it’s catastrophic at all. It’s not as busy as it was, but there’s still a lot of action in the market. [23:39] How can product managers and leaders prepare themselves for their next move during a slowdown? That’s difficult to answer because that’s a very personal decision. People have different circumstances and different levels of acceptable risk. There’s no harm looking. You can use your network to reach out tentatively or work with consultancies to make targeted applications discreetly. Action Guide: Put the information Chris shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links: Visit IntelligentPeople.com for product management recruitment Listen to episode 102: Executive coaching for product managers – with Evan Roth Innovation Quote “Have courage and be kind.”  – from Cinderella 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 get involved in inspiring the next generation’s workforce Today we are talking about preparing the next generation of innovators. If you are a parent, have a nephew or niece, or want to help influence future innovators, this will be a very helpful discussion for you, especially if the kids you can influence are in grades 6-12 or will be in the future. Joining us is Jennifer Kopach, the CEO of Science Olympiad and President of the Science Olympiad USA Foundation Board. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:06] What is Science Olympiad? We’re one of the largest STEM competitions in the United States. We have school teams in all 50 states and have been around for almost 40 years. Science Olympiad is creating the next generation’s workforce. Right before the pandemic, we had about 8,000 teams of kids in grades 6-12 and almost a quarter of a million students competing. The way Science Olympiad works is there are 23 events for each division. Kids form a team of 15 in their school. They practice just like an athletic team, and they advance through levels of competition from Regionals to State to Nationals. Every year we have alumni who graduate, go on to college, and go into STEM careers or other careers, and from Science Olympiad they take the soft skills of collaboration, teamwork, and intellectual curiosity that are the hallmarks of Science Olympiad. We hear from our workforce partners that when the alumni show up at work, they have those teamwork skills already embedded in their processes. They’re problem solvers, creative, not afraid to take risks, and not afraid to fail. In Science Olympiad, students work with people they might not necessarily know. They learn from them and learn different skill sets. Science Olympiad includes a lot of cross-column learning. Some people are more interested in engineering, others in study skills or lab skills, and they come together and learn from each other. [5:54] What do you tell parents about why their kids should be in Science Olympiad? I like to share the participants’ comments. The thing I hear the most is that Science Olympiad was that “one thing” in the student’s life. It was the thing that really brought them to school. It’s what kept them going to school. It’s what kept them interested in the subject matter that connected the real world to what they were learning in the classroom. Sure, there are lots of great students, and they’re obviously going to excel, but Science Olympiad allows them to choose the topic they want to excel in. They can apply their learning in ways the classroom doesn’t offer. Parents who are looking to give their kids a nudge in the direction of certain activities should know Science Olympiad will definitely create a skillset in a student that they can take throughout their time in college and entire career. [6:16] Tell us more about how Science Olympiad is structured and what students learn in Science Olympiad. Science Olympiad was founded by a group of people who were super committed to science education. They wanted to share the love of all sciences. Science Olympiad is not just robotics olympiad or biology olympiad or chemistry olympiad. They wanted something for everyone, so they created this great system of 23 events across different columns: life science, earth and space science, physics and chemistry, tech and engineering, and inquiry of science. There are 15 kids on a team and 23 events, and students work in pairs on each event, so they’re never working alone and they each have do more than one event. If a student is really into studying, they can do a bio event, but they could also try a building event and a chemistry event. We really encourage students to branch out and try different things and we make sure we also help the teachers by making the events aligned to the curriculum. Science Olympiad is everything the kids are learning in school, just on steroids. Part of the fun of a Science Olympiad tournament is students usually get to go to a big high school, community college, or university. They not only get to be doing what they love, which is science, but also get to be part of the team with a bunch of people who are their friends. Then they’re with a professor who is at the front of the room running the event, and that’s really exciting and inspiring because they have immediate access to these mentors and a vision of what it’s going to be like when they go to college. [11:15] How does Science Olympiad choose the events? We rotate about a quarter of the events every year. There are some signature events that we cannot get rid of. If we didn’t have Write It Do It, I think we would have a mass mutiny. Other events like Disease Detectives, which is an epidemiological event, stay in the rotation every year, but we change up the subtopics. We like to freshen things up and follow the science. If there’s something new and cool in codebusting or cybersecurity, we build an event around it. For example, we now have a Write It CAD It event. We don’t stray too much from the regular school curriculum, but we like to keep it fresh. We’re always working with our industry and government partners, like NASA, the U.S. Forest Service, the CDC, the NIH, and NOAA to stay on top of what’s cutting edge in science. [13:28] How can families find out more about joining a Science Olympiad team? Visit our website soinc.org to find out how your student can join a team through their school. We’re open to public school, private schools, charter schools, and homeschools. [15:14] How can product managers and innovators get involved as mentors in Science Olympiad? Science Olympiad would not exist if it were not for volunteers. We rely on a giant volunteer army to run our competitions, coach teams, and act as mentors. We look for subject matter experts in all our event categories. We need people to work with the students to inspire them and help them prepare for the competitions. We provide students with a set of rules that they use to practice for the events. For every one of those 23 events, we need people to run the students through the content and provide the bridge between the content and what it’s like to actually be in the real world doing this as your career. [17:25] Can you share some success stories about former Science Olympiad competitors? Our Science Olympiad alumni are some of the most amazing people out there—everyone from NASA astronauts to CEOs and people running startups to engineers and professors at universities across the country. Some of my favorite alumni stories are: Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook: He filled out his handwritten application to Harvard with all of his Science Olympiad medals. Steve Chen, founder of YouTube Reed Timmer, storm chaser and meteorologist: He started out in Michigan and loved all the nature events. He received medals in Fossils and Rocks and went on to get a degree in meteorology and become a renowned storm chaser. He designed one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen, the Dominator series of tornado-proof vehicles. Chris Curro, professor of electrical engineering: He won a huge student competition at Cooper Union in New York for developing the rapid packing container. He likes to say Science Olympiad taught him how to prototype, ideate, and redevelop. He and his partner in Science Olympiad did a lot of building events, and they took those skills with them to college. They were ready for the student competition for design and development of a product, won the competition, and received a US patent. [21:14] What are some other benefits of Science Olympiad? Science Olympiad is helpful for scholarship interviews, and some colleges list Science Olympiad as a recommended activity for students hoping to come to their college. It’s not just because you won a gold medal. It’s because those medals exemplify all the work you did and the skills colleges and employers are looking for—somebody who is resilient, has grit, and is not afraid to work with a complete stranger and put your heart and soul into something and have it not just be about you. Sometimes I get a note from a student saying, “I did Science Olympiad, and I’m awesome, but my partner stinks and we didn’t win. Can I get my own medal or can I advance individually?” I say, “Let me tell you how the world works. It’s not just about you.” I relish those moments as teachable moments. Life is not a straight, upward line that you can control. Science Olympiad helps students understand that and makes them better people, because if they don’t fail until later it’s going to hurt a lot worse. It’s really important for students to understand that being part of a team, being part of something that isn’t always perfect, is a really good thing to learn very young. Science Olympiad also inspires students. I’ve had students from underserved areas tell me that when they showed up at a Science Olympiad tournament, they thought, “I didn’t realize this many people just like me also love science.” They find their people. The students who do Science Olympiad are not the stereotypical kids you’d think of. Many of them are multitasking overachievers who are doing every competition—band, theatre, sports. Science Olympiad develops the whole child experience. It is one of the best ways for students to have an extracurricular that not only feeds their minds but also feeds their spirits. Action Guide: Put the information Jennifer shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links: Learn more about Science Olympiad Check out the Science Olympiad state websites to find out how you could get involved as a mentor, event supervisor, or parent Innovation Quote “As engineers, we want to create things that don’t necessarily exist on the planet, or may have never existed, but that solve real problems.” – Dr. Frances Arnold “If you’re going to change the world, you’ve got to be fearless.” – Dr. Frances Arnold 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 get market-driven data to make product decisions quickly This episode is sponsored by PDMA, the Product Development and Management Association. PDMA is a global community of professional members whose skills, expertise and experience power the most recognized and respected innovative companies in the world. PDMA is also the longest-running professional association for product managers, leaders, and innovators, having started in 1976. I have enjoyed being a member of PDMA for more than a decade, finding their resources and network very valuable. Learn more about them at PDMA.org. PDMA invited me to their conference, which was in Orlando, Florida, to interview some of their speakers. This speaker spoke on the Three ways to escape gut-feeling and boost innovation rapidly to markets. The topic is about techniques to increase the innovation success rate. For example, by applying Lean innovation, you can speed up development by up to 60% and increase profitability by 31%. Ulrike Laubner-Kelleher is a sought-after mentor, educator, and presenter on the topics of product management, innovation and teams efficiency. She helps product teams get ahead of their competitors by finding innovations quickly and developing and launching complex hardware and software products on time. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:04] You shared a method during your talk called CuCoCo for getting market-driven data to make product decisions quickly. Can you walk us through the method? CuCoCo is an abbreviation for Customer, Context, and Company. It’s a method for market-driven analysis. In many companies, data to make market-driven decisions is missing for several reasons—people don’t have time, they don’t know how to do it correctly, or nobody tells them what to do. CuCoCo is a method to empower product managers to find the right data. First, we need to talk to the customer. We should have innovation that fulfills a purpose for the customer. The customer tells us about their problems, and it’s our job to find the right solutions. We need the right questions to ask customers. The product manager needs to get the answers that are used for setting up the product strategy and for marketing and development, so we have clarity. Start with the customer and find out what the problem is. The questions we equip product managers with help them find clarity on the buyer persona (used for marketing) and the user persona (used for development). The more interviews you do, you see the priority of problems and requirements. You also get information to help with promotion, pricing, sales, and marketing. [6:53] What are some of your favorite questions to ask customers? My favorite question to start with is “What does your typical day look like?” This serves as a bridge to make the customer start talking because they know their day very well. They say what is good and what is not very good about their day, and then you dive deeper and follow with other questions. [7:43] Tell us about Context. The context surrounds the company and products. First, what is the competition doing? Where are they positioning their product? What marketing and sales are they doing? Where are they selling it? What are they not doing? The things they’re not doing make good entry points for us. For instance, if there is a market segment they are not serving, we can grow our company in that direction. The next part of context analysis is a PESTLE analysis, which looks at external factors—political, economic, social, technological, legal, and environmental—that is, all the trends impacting the business environment. There are so many new laws and environmental factors impacting our businesses that weren’t there 50 years ago. If recycling is important to customers or there’s a new law coming up, and we forgot about those things, we’re going to need to make a lot of changes. Those changes are very expensive and take your development people away because they don’t want to amend the product, work on it again, test it again, and launch it again. Then you won’t have the resources to work on the next product, so it’s very important to look at PESTLE factors upfront. As a product manager, know what your company is doing. Half of the product managers in my masterclasses say they don’t have clarity on the strategy of the company. They’re very frustrated because they put in a lot of work and present their concept, but if it doesn’t follow the direction of the company’s strategy, they can’t execute it. It’s better to understand the company’s vision, strategy, and competence upfront and align those with the product strategy. Many product managers spend too much time firefighting and being distracted from spending time with customers. Say no to many things that distract you from focusing on customer interviews. [20:11] Can you give us an example of how Lean innovation practices can improve success by reducing waste? One of the biggest problems in product management is the waste of neglecting talents. A lot of teams struggle with their roles and tasks. They spend a lot of time discussing decisions and waste time with meetings, emails, discussion, and frustration before they make the decision. The team is empowered by knowing their roles, tasks, and responsibilities. Each role should have the best person for that role—someone motivated and skilled who would like to do the work. We’ve seen if you have the right person in the right place, you are nine times faster. We try to figure out how we can improve the work without a huge investment in technology. We find the best template and tools that we can use to facilitate the work and speed it up. If we facilitate product management with new templates and tools and give information to development, marketing, sales, and customer service so they have compound information, they can all work more efficiently. So many times I’ve seen people say, “Thank you, for the first time I really got all the information I need.” [25:37] You also talked about the secret behind Tesla’s speed and profit—the Four-P Pyramid. Can you take us through that? Elon Musk is a great innovator, and I was analyzing what makes a good innovator. Tesla is a newcomer in car manufacturing, but they’re leaving everyone else behind since they’re so much quicker. One of Elon Musk’s principles is to be very fast in innovation. He innovates the product and the service. He’s the first CEO I’ve seen who talks about the whole product—not just the car but also everything around it. The profit on Teslas is 4.5 times that of any other electric car manufacturer. As I was looking into this, I found that successful innovators use the Four-P Pyramid—they care about the product, people, and process and make a profit. Tesla cares about a product that solves a problem in the market. They would like to have a solution that helps the customer and the environment. Tesla makes the next feature as quickly as possible and uses a lot of feedback to make small changes they can launch quickly. The second part of the pyramid is about the people. Elon Musk says he needs motivated, skilled people who can change throughout the product. He needs Agile teams that have knowledge. People don’t have to ask all the time, “Am I allowed to do that?”  Musk needs a team that makes decisions independently. Third is process. Tesla has slick, automated processes. They get rid of waste that does not add any value by automating tasks like copying, pasting, and searching. If you care about the product, people, and process, then you have a profit. Elon Musk says innovation is a risk and you have to allow mistakes. If you  punish your people for taking risks, they will not do it again. Action Guide: Put the information Ulrike shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links: Visit Ulrike’s website, RedStringMethods.com Connect with Ulrike on LinkedIn Learn more about Pro Produkt Management software 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