Product Mastery Now for Product Managers, Leaders, and Innovators

How to achieve product-market fit – for product managers 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 emceed the conference and presented on Lean Product Management: How to Achieve Product-Market Fit. Our guest will teach us a simple but effective process for creating successful products. Dan Olsen is a returning guest to the podcast. He is a well-known product management trainer, consultant, and speaker. He is also the author of the bestselling product management book, The Lean Product Playbook. Through his talks and interactive training workshops, Dan helps companies build great products and strong product teams. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [3:38] What are the steps of the Lean Product Process? The Product-Market Fit Pyramid is the key framework, and it has five layers that build on each other. Start at the bottom and work your way up: Market: 1. Target customer 2. Underserved needs Product: 3. Value proposition 4. Feature set 5. User experience (UX) Write down your hypotheses in each layer then test the product with customers to see where you’re at with product-market fit. Iterate those assumptions and hypotheses until you get to the level of product-market fit you want or decide to pivot. [8:38] How do we identify our target customer? It’s important to start in the problem space. Get really clear on who has the problem, because those details will change how you solve it. Segment the market by: Demographics (or firmographics for B2B). Usually demographics show correlation, not causality, but they’re a good starting point. Attitudes: What do customers believe? What’s important to them? For example, how much do different segments care about the environment? Behaviors: What are customers doing? For example, power users vs. lightweight users. Needs: What are the different needs of different segments? This is the closest to causality. Use all four ways of segmenting. To find out if your segments are clear enough, interview ten customers. If five of them love your prototype and five don’t, that’s a hint you haven’t segmented your market enough. What is the salient attribute you missed? Adding that attribute adds predictive power to your model. The Lean Product Process helps teams get aligned. If we’re not aligned on the customer, of course we’re going to have disagreements about features and prioritization. Create a simple persona to get everybody on the same page. [13:45] How do we discover underserved needs? Find out why the problem is important to your customer. How is it going to create value for them? Don’t go rushing into the solution space without being clear on who your customer is and what problem you’re going to solve for them. People don’t want a quarter-inch drill; they want a quarter-inch hole. A product manager’s main job is to define who our customer is and what their needs are. Map out a problem space definition. Brainstorm all the benefits you could address and organize them. Look for an unmet or underserved need. I use an importance vs. satisfaction framework to define how well-served or underserved each need is. How important is this need to the target market segment? And how satisfied are they with the current solution? If they have an important need and have not yet found a satisfactory solution, that’s where the opportunities are. [18:18] How do we define our value proposition? Out of all the benefits we brainstormed, what are we going to actually promise to customers? And what’s our plan for how to do it in a way that’s better than the competition? How are we going to deliver higher levels of satisfaction? I apply the Kano model, which is a categorization scheme for problems using three relevant categories: Performance benefits or features: You can plot this on a graph. The x-axis is how fully the products meets the need (from 0% to 100%), and the y-axis is how much customer satisfaction or dissatisfaction results. Usually you can quantify performance. For example, if we’re in the microprocessor chip business and everybody else’s chips are 2 GHz and ours is 3 GHz, we’re outperforming by 1 GHz. Must-haves: If your product fully meets the must-have needs, it doesn’t make customers happy. If you don’t have a must-have, customers won’t buy your product. For example, HIPAA is a must-have in health tech. It doesn’t make people excited, but you must have it. Delighters: The opposite of a must-have. If you don’t have a delighter, it doesn’t cause a problem because people aren’t expecting it. For example, yesterday at the conference, Hershey brought a huge table of chocolate. I was not expecting to get some yummy Reese’s peanut butter cups when I came to the PDMA conference, so I was delighted to have those. We create a value prop grid where we list the performance benefits, must-haves, and delighters in rows and each of our competitors in columns. We do competitive analysis to see which areas each competitor is best at. Then we analyze our product. How are we going to be better? Which row are we going to dominate? The next step is our feature set and MVP, so we need to be really clear on how we’re going to create more value. We make sure our MVP addresses those differentiating needs. Once we’ve figured out how we’re going to be better or different, we need to figure out how to position and message our product. A great example is the iPod’s messaging—”a thousand songs in your pocket.” [25:38] Tell us about the minimum viable product. Now that we’ve got a solid grounding in the problem space, we need to brainstorm feature ideas for each value prop benefit. Break down your features into smaller feature chunks. Then do ROI analysis and create a roadmap. Create a MVP roadmap by listing the same benefits from the value prop grid—performance benefits, must-haves, and delighters. Then deploy the feature chunks by version in each category. For version 1, which chunks do we need to have in there? Usually you need the must-haves in version 1 and whatever special sauce your value prop is. You can build out your value prop over time. This simple one-page roadmap visualization, anchored in your value prop, helps everybody understand what’s in scope and out of scope. The whole point of the MVP is to prevent over-scoping the product before you’ve confirmed whether you’re going in the right direction, but ironically one of the top mistakes teams make is over-scoping the MVP. By having that visualization, you can have those tough debates—do we really need this feature in version 1 or can it wait for version 1.1? When I do this exercise, people get so fired up. They have pet features and are pounding the table saying, “We gotta have it!” I remind them, “Who’s the target customer?” The team members are not the target customer. In the absence of having a clear target customer, they advocate for their needs and their preferences. When we’re talking about any feature idea, of course it’s a good idea. It’s going to create some value. The question is, which ones are going to create the most value for customers? We have limited resources and need to talk about the trade-offs. People act like if they don’t get the feature in now, they never will. We can have a minimum viable feature. What absolutely needs to be in scope for a feature for this sprint? People act like if they don’t get their feature into this milestone, it’s never going to get built. There are places where that happens, but assuming it’s not happening, they’re delaying the whole project for one feature. You could launch on November 1st and then fast-follow with the extra feature on December 1st. Do you really want to delay the whole project a month for one feature? People don’t think about it that way. It gets emotional for people. A lot of it is not data-driven. It’s just following their gut and throwing spaghetti against the wall. [34:16] Tell us more about the prototype. In the previous step, the goal is to identify what functionality needs to be in the MVP and what can wait. At this point, you have no UX yet. The UX is in the solution space, and if you have a good design resource, they can help you explore the solution space and the UX. This can help you think of additional features or refine your features or problems. UX lets you show the product to a customer and get feedback, because no matter how good you are, nobody nails it the first time. Quickly get to the prototype so you can get it into customers’ hands. That’s when the real learning starts. [36:52] What tips do you have for testing? I’m a big fan of interactive prototypes. You can start off with hand sketches then use tools like Balsamiq, InVision, and Figma. Make a low-fidelity, interactive prototype of your MVP that you can show people and get feedback. Pattern-match the feedback. If you talk to ten people and eight of them can’t figure out how to get through the new user flow, you need to change something. Small sample sizes are okay. Some people are concerned about statistical significance, but if eight out of ten people can’t figure it out, you don’t need to test it with another 200 people. Get better results by how you ask your questions. Don’t ask leading questions like, “That was easy to use, wasn’t it?” or closed-ended questions like, “Did you like that feature?” Ask open-ended questions like, “What did you think about that feature?” People tend to be nice and don’t want to point out problems, so tell them they’re helping you by finding the problems. Action Guide: Put the information Dan shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links: Check out Dan’s book The Lean Product Playbook Visit Dan’s website Check out Dan’s video How to Create a Winning Message for Your Product and other videos on his YouTube channel Learn more about the Lean Product Meetup Community 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

Injecting the theme park industry’s experience model into product development 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 gave a keynote on transforming products into experiences: injecting the theme park industry’s experience model into product development. In other words, what can we learn from theme parks to help us do a better job creating products our customers love? Geoff Thatcher is the Founder & Chief Creative Officer at Creative Principals. As an experienced creative director, he excels at leading projects from concept to reality. These projects are most often about creating world-class experiences in corporate visitor centers, museums, theme parks, and live events. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:13] Tell us about your work creating customer experiences. I started in the experience industry as a 14-year-old cleanup boy at a swimming pool. My job was to make sure the customers experienced a clean pool. I went on to be a lifeguard, a train engineer, and a manager in a rides department. One of the most memorable experiences was working on the Mack Wild Mouse coaster, a classic coaster that was very fun to operate. I worked ten years at Laguna amusement park in Farmington, Utah, and then had a brief flirtation with journalism for about two years. I really missed the parks, and as a journalism major in college I realized our job creating experiences was really about telling stories. I was able to combine the education I got writing and telling stories with telling stories at theme parks, museums, and brand experiences around the world. I love a good story. Amusement parks have their place, but I love the evolution from amusement parks to theme parks—where the rides tell a story. [8:58] How can we use this perspective focused on the customer experience to improve products? To summarize the customer experience  framework: Attract attention Build trust Give the information customers need to move forward Create an experience for customers to internalize the product Be purposeful about the action you want customers to take The customer experience means the customer is on a journey. The experience model is similar to the hero’s journey and other models that are deeply embedded in the human psyche. I don’t claim to have invented the experience model. I recently wrote a piece talking about the tabernacle in the wilderness as a product experience. The way the priest went through the tabernacle in the wilderness very much aligns with the experience model and the hero’s journey, so these things are just part of who we are as human beings. Any product should be an experience. The first thing you have to do is attract people’s attention. Often, that’s through product design. If it’s a theme park ride, it’s through an icon. If it’s a museum experience, it might be through signage. If it’s a brand experience, it might be something as simple as a logo. Once you attract someone’s attention, you have to build their trust. At a trade show, that could be as simple as a handshake. It could be as complicated as an immersive queue through the Hogwarts castle that looks exactly like it did in the movies, so if you’re a fan of the movies, you think, “This is legit,” and that trust is established. When you’re developing a product, what are you going to embed in that product that will build trust with customers? Next you have to give them the information they need to move forward in their journey. We’ve seen products fail because people do not know how to use them. We’ve seen experiences fail because people don’t know what’s happening next. Often in a theme park, that information is delivered in the pre-show. Now people are ready to internalize the story. In a theme park, internalizing might be hopping on a coaster. We’re working on a project right now called the Ozark Mill at Finley Farms in Ozark, MO. The Ozark Mill is a historic grain mill. It’s been there for almost 200 years and it’s beautiful. The internalized moment isn’t anything we manufactured. It’s when you step out of the mill onto a platform and you see the waterfall coming over the mill pond and the tree and birds chirping and sun shining. That’s the moment when the story hits home, and you realize the connection. There’s great symbolism in the power of that stream and how it has transformed communities like Ozark. That’s the internalized moment. As a product manager, you hit your customer with emotion and they internalize that product. Next is action. What do you want that person to do? Cynically, people think all we want in this industry is for customers to exist through retail. There are gift shops at the end of rides, and we do want people to buy things, but it’s more than that. We want people to become part of the story. When you go on the Hogwarts Forbidden Journey ride, you exit through retail. They want you to buy a wand or t-shirt or jersey, but when you’re looking at the quidditch jerseys for teams from Slytherin, Hufflepuff, Gryffindor, and Raven Claw, what’s important is “Where do I belong?” It fosters conversations among family and friends. You talk about the attributes of each house and become part of the story. As product managers, think about what action you want people to take with your products. How can they become part of the story? [16:18] Can you take us through an example of a project and what you learned to create a better experience and a better product? I just flew back from Singapore where we were working with a property insurance company called FM Global. Some people say insurance is boring, but it’s quite fascinating. FM Global is one of the world’s leaders in property insurance, and they have a very unique story. They have an engineering-based approach. When you want to become a customer, their engineers show up and look at your facility. They figure out where you can make engineering-based improvements, and if you make those changes FM Global will lower your insurance. The company started 200 years ago when Zachariah Allen was operating a mill in Providence, RI, and he made improvements so it wouldn’t burn down. He asked his insurance company for a discount, but they said no. Zachariah banded together with a few other mill owners who had also made those improvements, and they founded Factory Mutual insurance company, which is FM Global today. FM Global has a new Singapore headquarters. When you walk inside, the first thing you see is a two-story LED column that’s giving you real-time data and a visualization of property risk around the world. This conveys trust—FM Global is monitoring the information and doing their job. Then you go upstairs and grab a cup of coffee and have a conversation with somebody while looking at the LED column of risk. Trust is established. Then you go into a theater and watch a presentation about FM Global. The theater is customer-built with wind effects, and it shakes during the earthquake section. That’s where you get the information you need to move forward in the journey. Then you go to a series of nine labs—a sprinkler lab where you see sprinklers work, a natural hazard lab where you can fire a 2×4 through a wall and design a factory to withstand floods, and others. This is where you internalize the message. Finally, you step into a nice boardroom and have conversations about how your property can lower its risk. How can you improve mitigation? What technology can you install? FM Global wants clients to make those improvements to lower their risk. [22:40] What is new in the area of experience design? There are always trends in new coaster technology, virtual reality, and augmented reality. One of the things that’s really earth-shattering is artificial intelligence design. This really hit in June 2022, and it’s fundamentally transforming how we work and being very disruptive. Some people are angry about it, and others are loving it and embracing artificial intelligence design tools, including writing tools like Jasper and design tools like Midjourney on DALL-E 2. This technology started when software engineers were working on software to describe photographs. They realized if they have a software that can describe photographs, why not have a software that takes a prompt and generates an image? Why not learn from all the different artistic styles—painting, impressionism, cubism, watercolor—or even specific artists? When DALL-E 2 hit in June, I immediately signed up and started using it. It’s pretty earth-shattering. I’m a writer, but now I’m a designer too because all I have to do is write a prompt and I can generate anything I want. We’ve decided as a company to fully embrace artificial intelligence design tools. There are illustrators in the industry who are extremely threatened by this. They feel like it’s going to take their jobs. My daughter Zoe is a designer and an illustrator, and she has decided to fully embrace artificial intelligence design. She loves how much faster she can work, and AI doesn’t fundamentally change how she works. No one really draws everything by hand anymore. Zoe also says what she loves about AI tools is she’s learning from them. AI is making her a better artists because she’ll look at what the AI is doing and think, “Oh, I hadn’t thought of that.” We did a project last week, and typically it takes one day to do one concept rendering. Zoe did ten renderings in one day using AI. They weren’t as specific or detailed; they were more conceptual. But the client was okay with that. We’re fully transparent with our clients when we use AI design, and I think that is very important. In the conceptual phase, we don’t need all the details. We’re just trying to get the mood right. The clients are happier because one photorealistic rendering can easily cost thousands of dollars. For the same amount, with AI design we can make 10-15 renderings that are loose but give an idea of the concept, and we can easily update the prompt in response to client feedback and explore more ideas. I always try to make an argument against photoreal renders in the concept phase. I’m doing the client a favor because if I give them a photo reel and then a year from now we make changes along the way, the CEO might say that doesn’t look like what they approved a year ago. If you have to deliver a photo reel in the concept phase, you’re not going to have the flexibility you need moving forward through product development to make the right decisions because you’re worried about the original concept. Keep it chill and loose. Put the information Geoff shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links: Visit CreativePrinciples.com Check out Creative Principles’ YouTube channel Park Pals Connect with Geoff and Creative Principles on Facebook 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 can learn about innovation from the U.S. government’s innovation efforts Today we are talking about building more innovative organizations. To help us with that, we have the author of Creating Innovation Navigators: Achieving Mission Through Innovation joining us. That is Sabra Horne, who is Entrepreneur in Residence at BMNT, where she supports the development and deployment of government innovation efforts. Before joining BMNT, she was Chief of the Innovation Hub, responsible for envisioning, establishing, and developing innovation efforts in the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Previously, she served the National Security Agency (NSA) as Deputy Chief for Information Sharing and Collaboration, facilitating sharing of NSA’s most highly classified intelligence.  Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [1:59] What is the state of innovation in government organizations? We probably think of the government as a bureaucratic mechanism that is slow and lumbering, but there are many innovative organizations within the government, such as NASA and DARPA. In many cases, the government can be somewhat slow, and we intentionally bring people to the government who are not experts in innovation—people who are great at following processes and strategies so we have repeatable efforts consistently focused on making the best use of taxpayer dollars. The challenge is balancing the responsibility of being methodical and precise with having innovative tactics. Every individual within the government has the ability to be more innovative, if we think about what that might look like, how we could achieve that, and how we’re going to achieve mission impact even more effectively. [5:38] Are we competitive in innovation across the U.S., and are we able to make the best use of innovation across entire organizations? We are able to do some amazing things that people could never imagine. We realize there’s a great nation race, and we must keep on top of that. It’s important for us to figure out how we can bring emerging technologies to bear as quickly as possible for mission impact. Using commercial and emerging technologies as effectively and quickly as possible is critical. But there are a lot of different ways we can bring about innovation within the government, and by focusing only on emerging or commercial technologies, we’re missing a lot of what we can make happen. We can also look at strategies, processes, policies, or ways of communicating, and rethink how we do those things so we are being more effective and delivering mission impact. Innovation is not just about technology. It’s important for everyone to see their own role and how they can rethink what they’re doing and make it easier and more effective. [9:42] How can we do a better job innovating? One way to achieve innovation is by using innovation methodologies and tools. For example, the U.S. Navy’s Tactical Advancements for the Next Generation (TANG) program uses a human-centered design approach to thinking about mission problems and being able to connect with end users so they understand the problem and are able to create solutions that are more effective in bringing mission impact. It’s also important to look at innovation strategically. For example, when I was at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), I was charged with standing up the innovation hub. First, I asked myself, Why do we need innovation within CISA and what are our challenges and strengths? CISA is challenged with a mammoth mission of informing the 4.7 million owners and operators of critical infrastructure about cyber threats and keeping the .gov domain safe from cyber threats. We only have 2200 people to achieve that mission. The last thing we needed to do was load more work onto these incredibly overworked people. If I was going to bring in innovation, it was critical I found partnerships outside of CISA. One of the programs I stood up was called Hacking for Homeland Security, which makes use of university students who are working to solve innovation problems in an entrepreneurship course. We worked with students from Carnegie Mellon who spent time thinking about how we might assist small and medium-sized businesses who have few resources to better keep themselves safe from cyber threats. [13:32] What is the innovation pipeline? The innovation pipeline is a process in which we find new opportunities where we might bring in innovation. We want to look at the problems the workforce or our end users are having and how we might create a solution. The innovation pipeline is a five-step process to understand from the end users what their problems are: Sourcing problems in the widest manner possible and understanding the wide range of problems we have to work on Curating, prioritizing, refining, and ranking the problems so we know we’re working on the most important problems Exploring possible solutions by looking in-depth at pain points Incubating the solution and understand how it is going to be effective in meeting the needs Deploying the solution into an operational solution It’s important to spend resources on projects that matter, so understanding what is needed from a strategic perspective in innovation is fundamental. That’s why the first step of the process is understanding what we’re trying to achieve in the organization and how we can use innovation to achieve that. Understanding end users and their problems is central to innovation. It’s important to talk to them, ask a lot of questions, and understand their challenges to develop a solution that answers everyone’s needs. Get people to support your innovation efforts—advocates who take action to support you. Action Guide: Put the information Sabra shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links: Check out Sabra’s book, Creating Innovation Navigators: Achieving Mission Through Innovation Learn more about BMNT and read Sabra’s blog post, “What I Wish Someone Had Told Me Then: Creating Innovation In Public Sector Organizations” Innovation Quote “This is the true joy in life, being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one. Being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances, complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community and as long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it what I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work, the more I live.” – George Bernard Shaw 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

Insights from an innovative Design-Thinking program Today we are talking about Design Thinking through the lens of a unique new program at the University of Wisconsin that is teaching product design from a multiple-discipline perspective. For example, product design grad students learn UI/UX principles while learning about electronic circuits and product packaging. The cross-discipline experience is unique and provides a valuable perspective. Joining us to discuss Design Thinking is a recent graduate of this program, Emily Phelan. Emily is now a customer experience strategist for Landor & Fitch, the New York-based brand and design group. Previously she was a marketing specialist for Accenture. She also had her own design company and pursued other entrepreneurial interests. And Emily is an amazing illustrator—check out her LinkedIn profile for some of the superheroes she has designed. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [5:49] Can you take us through the Design Thinking framework as you applied it through the University of Wisconsin’s program? The framework we used was from the Stanford d.school. There are four phases: Empathizing Defining the problem Ideating Prototyping and testing [10:05] How did you use this framework in your project? I led a team through a redesign of a diabetes self-management program website. Our client was the Wisconsin Institute for Healthy Aging, and they had a diabetes-self-management program called Healthy Living with Diabetes. We were tasked with redesigning the program to be more inclusive of the black community in Wisconsin. We started with identifying one anothers’ strengths. We needed to figure out what hats we all needed to wear and how we could best work together. Then we dove right into the empathy phase. We spoke with program coordinators, facilitators of the program, participants, doctors, health educators, and nurse educators. We needed to learn what the program currently looked like from the perspectives of all the stakeholders. Doctors and health educators were two critical stakeholders who had been completely overlooked. We found that in order to serve the participants and facilitators, we needed to engage doctors and health educators, who can make recommendations to patients and kickstart the self-management journey. [15:56] How did you engage each of these stakeholders? We did in-depth interviews. They were typically 45 minutes to one and a half hours. We had an interviewer asking questions and a scribe capturing information. It’s important to lay the groundwork with a comprehensive interview guide to achieve your goals, but it’s also important to go off script. If an interviewee is telling an important story, lean into that conversation. [18:07] What other steps did you take? We identified the problem by looking at patterns in our research. After conducting the interviews, we put ideas on post-it notes so we could move them around and identify patterns. We identified several key themes and barriers to the program. We found seven key insights that led us to three opportunity areas that we needed to build out to figure out the best solution to the problem. For each opportunity we had four to five ideas for solutions. We crafted a “how might we…” question for each opportunity: How might we inform and empower facilitators to facilitate a better workshop? How might we help participants sustain their healthy habits beyond the program? And how might we inform and engage health educators to be ambassadors of the program? [20:48] How did prototyping work? Before we prototyped, we analyzed the resources these opportunities would require and their potential impact. We built several prototypes of solutions: a healthy-living-with-diabetes conference marketed to health educators, a newsletter that program coordinators could use to market to health educators, and a website that included health educators in the ecosystem and provided resources they could use with patients. After prototyping, iterating, and testing, we ended up going with the website and accompanying resources. We got feedback from all the stakeholders and used it to iterate the website. [23:34] Was there anything in the design thinking process that you found you needed to apply differently? Since we were so heavy on our empathy phase, we could have spent more time on prototyping and testing near the end of the project in order to get a few more features on the website. We built a marketing plan for the client, and I would have loved to help them build the solution out. They took our work and are using it to conduct their redesign, but staying involved in that work would have been excellent. Action Guide: Put the information Emily shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links: Connect with Emily on LinkedIn Check out EmilyPhelan.com Check out Design is Storytelling and Speculative Everything Learn more about Stanford d.school Innovation Quote “Commit and figure it out.” – Jimmy Chen  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 to get out of your organization’s routine and create real value – for product managers 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 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 presented on the topic Get into the Discovery Zone. With Lean and Agile methods, it is too easy for teams to fall into the trap of pursuing speed and a sense of progress, while failing to provide value on the most important aspects that customers need. The Discovery Zone changes that. We’ll find out how from David Matheson. He’s a Practitioner & Thought Leader in Portfolio & Innovation Management and cofounder of SmartOrg, a Silicon Valley based company that connects innovation and finance. With decades of experience, David has helped senior management of firms around the world improve their results from portfolio management, product development, innovation, R&D, capital investment and strategy. He earned a Ph.D. at Stanford University where he has also taught strategic portfolio management. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:10] What is the problem that led to the Discovery Zone? The Discovery Zone grew out of my work with HP. Around the time the Apple Watch came out, HP had the best smartwatch. The innovation team was charged with figuring out if they could pull off a digital watch. They made a really cool watch and sold enough to show it’s real. Everyone got super excited. The management review board’s next questions was “How do we make a business out of this for HP?” The team ran ahead and made more watches. They proliferated about 10 different watches, and they all sold and made more money. The team came back and said, “Look at our great success,” but management said, “You did not answer our question. In fact you’ve demonstrated this cannot be a business for HP.” And they killed the program. It was probably the right call because the innovators charged ahead with making the product and didn’t think about answering the questions that would really make this work for HP. HP made a few SKUs of laptops and sold millions. Watches run in ten thousands. The innovation team demonstrated unintentionally they couldn’t make it scalable. There’s an innovation blind spot that Lean and Agile methods invite us to walk into. We come up with hypotheses and do the ones that make the most traction. “Learn quick” is the mantra. That’s good as far as it goes, but most teams often don’t do critical thinking. They don’t take a broad enough view and work on the wrong hypotheses is. Like the team at HP, they’re not asking the right questions. [8:33] What is the Discovery Zone? The Discovery Zone is customer discovery when the customer is internal to the organization or is the organization itself. It’s outside your comfort zone. As an innovator, you hear what your stakeholders want from the perspective of the routine of the organization. Routine is a giant distraction machine, but there’s a lot of political force around that. You want to make progress, so you listen to your key stakeholders. You pick something small to work on in your comfort zone. That’s not the job of the innovator. That’s what HP was doing. They knew how to make things, so they made watches. The Discovery Zone takes a different perspective. First, get multiple perspectives on what the issues are—what’s between you and the big dream. Look for issues that are both speculative and impactful. Speculative means they’re outside the company’s wheelhouse. Surprise is likely and we’re making it up has we go. There’s uncertainty and ignorance is high. Impact means how much resolving the uncertainty will change the confidence in the business case. In the HP example, the question of whether they could make more watches had an impact of +/-10% on the business case. People knew you could do that. The questions of whether HP could do it in a modular, scalable way would change the business case 10-20x. The Discovery Zone is where you pursue high-impact, high-ignorance opportunities. It’s the place where you’re making it up, you’re going to be surprised, and what you learn will dramatically change the business case. This is where the innovation blind spots are. People don’t talk about them because they’re scary. If you get the wrong answer, you’re done. But it’s this decisiveness that makes the Discovery Zone so powerful. [14:58] What’s another example of a product created in the Discovery Zone? In 2000, there were 46 billion 4×6 prints printed every year in stores. HP had developed a new printhead that could do 4×6 prints almost instantaneously. They had developed a vision of an ATM photo machine. They had done their voice-of-the-customer work and had developed beautiful kiosks. People loved it. I asked what the risks are on the project. The team said it boiled down to supply. I realized they were right, but I had asked the wrong question, because they loved to figure out supply. That is their comfort zone. I’m not questioning whether they can do it. I flipped it around and asked, “What would you want to know before you put your kids’ college funds into making this happen?” They quickly came up with a lot of issues with customer use patterns. The critical issue was, What’s the pattern of behavior? People loved it, but would people adopt it as technology? There’s a giant assumption people will make prints. We needed an experiment to tell us whether or not there’s a behavior change involved. We saturated a zip code with prototypes and spent half a million dollars doing a study. People loved it, but it was a novelty. Everybody tried it and nobody came back. Their Discovery Zone looked like a catastrophe. However, here’s the brilliant thing about the Discovery Zone— the possibility of learning something new does not come from your comfort zone. It comes from outside your comfort zone. The team found that some of the small stores who had installed the experimental kiosks had lost the photo business to big box stores needed a way to draw people back into stores for prints. They wanted the print engine. The head of the team went back to his boss, who knew something was wrong, and said, “I want to cancel the ATM program.” The boss was expecting him to defend it, but he immediately disarmed the conversation. He said, “I learned something so important. I have a proposal that I think is even better. Can I divert funds to that?” And he pitched the Minilab printer, which fills this niche. The executive got on board and helped create and upgrade that idea. Instead of fighting about the failure, this team leader completely reframed it. Had they not done that experiment they would have been $20 million in the holes three years later. He saved a bunch of money and got a second-at-bat. The Discovery Zone gives you new learning and insight. You’re managing risk. Reframing the failure makes you a steward of the resources. Make your experiments around what’s in the Discovery Zone, and if you’re successful, you’re a hero, and if not, you can learn and be a hero too because you’ve saved the company a lot of money they might have spent on something ridiculous. [24:16] How do we recognize that we should be in the Discovery Zone? The the ratio of speculation to actual knowledge around a project. Take a broad view of your issues. Get different perspectives and rank them by ignorance and impact. Figure out what uncertainties build confidence in the business case. As a rule of thumb, whatever you’re good at is going to be overworked. It’s probably what you’re not good at that you need to look at. That’s where you start to show a little fear or anxiety. You’re not sure how to answer the questions. You can role play as an outsider and ask questions that are to answer. Organize your learning plans around the Discovery Zone questions. You can learn a lot by thinking in terms of uncertainties. Focus on the upside uncertainties. For example, if you’re talking about the willingness to pay, be a dreamer and talk about the really optimistic price. What are the reasons that would make the willingness to pay high? Then ask, what are the reasons that would make the willingness to pay low? What are the differences between those scenarios and how can you go learn about it? Action Guide: Put the information David shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful link: Visit David’s website, SmartOrg.com 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 building a more collaborative product team – for product managers 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 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 presented on the topic Improv to Improve Your Team’s Creativity. How do you think improv can improve your product work and your group? We are about to find out. Our guest is Seth Greenwald, aka Sherpa Seth. He’s a best-selling author, keynote speaker and popular communication coach for creative professionals and technical leaders. He founded Creative Warrior Secrets to help professionals be excellent communicators and increase their success. He holds degrees in Mechanical Engineering and has served as design lead and senior project manager for many of the nation’s largest engineering and construction organizations. Among other publications on communication, he hosts an online course called Improv to Improve Your A-Game Mindset. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [3:13] What do you mean by improv to help teams improve? The improv TV show Whose Line Is It Anyway? was my inspiration. I saw how they did everything on the spot, and I always liked laughing, so I wanted that for my team. In many large organizations, people are working in silos and never really collaborate. I wanted to help them figure out how to break out of their silos and improvise. I was always the guy hiding behind my laptop. I wanted everyone to go away and just leave me alone and let me focus. That’s not good when I wanted to be in the world with other people. I needed to learn how to speak to and collaborate with people. I joined an organization called Toastmasters, and they taught me how to present, but I also wanted to learn how to speak with and collaborate with people when I’m not presenting. Whose Line Is It Anyway? was a revelation for me because they were so in-the-moment, focused, and working together. I didn’t want to be a comedian, but I did want to have fun with my team. I want to help you learn how to have fun with your team. That’s what I mean by improv communication. Instead of going back to your laptop and solving a problem by yourself, learn to solve problems together in real time. Each team member is coming to the problem from their own point of view, and you have to force yourself to organically solve the problem with others in the same space and timeframe. It’s hard for a lot of people to do that. You have to trust what comes out of your mouth and be in the moment. You need to listen fully and have a yes, and mindset. Go from a me go mindset—one person wins—to a we go mindset—we win together. [17:38] How do we be in the moment and appreciate what others bring to the table? You have to create before your critique. It feels good to judge, but before you critique you need to offer your creativity. There are stages of creative problem solving. The first stage is defining the problem. Make sure you’re solving the right problem. The second stage is divergent thinking where we come up with alternative options to solve the problem. At this point, we’re not judging each option yet. The third stage is convergent thinking where we choose a solution. You can’t mix up the creation stage with critique stage. [25:39] What’s an exercise we could introduce at our next team meeting to help people have fun and be creative together? Keep the words yes, and in mind. Yes means you’re listening. And is responding to and building on what you’ve heard. Saying yes, and prompts your brain to think in a more collaborative way. Do a yes, and exercise with your team. My favorite acronym is Together Everyone Achieves More (TEAM). That’s product management. Action Guide: Put the information Seth shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links: Check out Seth’s website Join Seth’s Improv2Improve Course and tell Seth you heard about it on the Product Mastery Now podcast to receive a discount 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

Insights on brand storytelling for product managers Today we are talking about the problem you solve, the value you create, and the difference you make—and not just you specifically but also your organization. Just like you, I have encountered organizations that confuse me—I’m uncertain what they are really about. This is a branding and messaging issue. As product professionals, we need to help position our products in ways that make sense for customers and the organization. We have to tell the product and brand story effectively. To help us do that, Sarah Panus is with us. She is a brand storytelling strategist and coach, host of the Marketing With Empathy podcast, and founder of Kindred Speak, which provides editorial brand storytelling services and coaching. Sarah also speaks on topics for humanizing your brand. Before starting Kindred Speak, she contributed to brand and marketing strategy for the Sleep Number Corporation and other companies. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:14] What is brand storytelling? Brand storytelling is when a brand shares editorial stories with their audience. Editorial stories are not promotional stories. They’re narrative stories designed to engage your audience, attract new people to your brand, and keep them engaged. They’re something your customer base wants more of, versus promotional content that they’re not really excited to read. Brand storytelling educates, entertains, and inspires your audience. A brand story isn’t solely about the product. Your webpage can talk all about the product features and benefits. Create a story around the problem the product solves . Bring in real people who can talk about their experience. The product isn’t the hero of the story. Your customer or the problem is, and the product gets mentioned as a secondary element that can help solve the problem. These are the types of stories you read in a magazine or on a digital site. You need both marketing storytelling and brand storytelling, but brand storytelling is better designed and what I’ve seen drive leading ROI of attracting the audience and keeping them engaged. [6:14] What do you do as a brand storytelling strategist? Think of me like a rental editor-in-chief. I develop editorial strategies. What are the storytelling pillars that you should focus on? I go through all the data to figure out what the brand cares about and wants to talk about and more importantly what the audience cares about. The sweet spot of those things is the low-hanging fruit . I use the FED method—focus, empathy, data. One element is figuring out how to get alignment throughout the organization. One big complaint from a marketing perspective is that content can live in silos and there’s no sharing. That can happen between marketing and product. I help with creating the culture of innovation among teams so you’re all working toward the same goal to drive the best results for the organization and have fun doing your job. I help manage blogs, podcast strategy, editorial calendars, and large content partnerships. I help be the extra voice, asking is this good editorial storytelling content? Does it feel humanized? Is it going to connect? [14:39] How can we use brand storytelling to have more influence with stakeholders? Brand storytelling can help give  you insights into what your audience is most interested in. As a content investigator, I go through tons of data internally and externally, so there might be other pieces of insights that people who are drafting content have that you as a product team don’t. If you’re launching a product, storytelling helps generate awareness of the product through those stories. Storytelling is like a marathon not a sprint. Anything that’s upper-funnel or mid-funnel takes a while, but it’s feeding that pipeline. Storytelling can help you understand what is and isn’t working—what messaging or features customers want to know more about. When you collaborate with the editorial team, you can marry both teams’ goals and share more of what the product team wants to get across. Storytelling amplifies that message and gets it across to more people. Your company will have a consistent voice, and your customers will repetitively see the key messages you care about. There’s a myth in marketing that if you build it, they will come. Obviously that’s not true. I wonder if in product there’s a myth that if you create it, they will buy it. Marketing and product need each other. It’s so important that storytelling go hand-in-hand with product. [19:02] How do you manage a shared, consistent voice between the product and editorial teams? For ultimate success there needs to be open communication between leaders at the C-suite level. Everyone needs to be talking cohesively and be unified on goals. It works best if there is dedicated product person who is the liaison to the marketing team. This person should have monthly calls, shared content calendars, emails, and tons of transparency with the marketing team. If you want to be that person, bring it up with your boss. If you manage a team and want to identify somebody who could be the marketing liaison, identify someone who wants to do it and is excited about it. [21:55] Can you tell use more about the FED (focus, empathy, data) framework? Focus: Have three storytelling pillars. They keep you honed in on the three nuggets you’re going to be talking about as a brand. I like the third one to be a little bit of a wild card that differentiates your company. Empathy: Cognitive empathy is the ability to understand how a person feels and what they might be thinking, and it helps us be better communicators. It helps you relay the best information that will best reach the person. Use empathy filters, which help you better connect with people. One empathy filter is data-informed empathy, for example if you know a percentage of your audience is parents with teenagers at home, you start to get insight into what life might be like for them. Another filter is SEO-informed empathy, for example if we see a large volume of people searching for advice on how to better communicate with teenagers, we can crate content around that. Human-informed empathy is shared feelings we can all relate to, like picking the longest checkout line at the store. Another one is nostalgia, and nostalgia in marketing is incredibly powerful. These are life moments a big chunk of people have gone through together, like experiencing COVID, growing up in the same decade, or having the same favorite toy or cartoon growing up. Data: Data takes the guesswork out of what you should talk about. You’re looking for where focus, empathy, and data overlap. A good storytelling plan needs all three. [25:27] What’s an example of using the FED framework? When I was at Sleep Number, we created a storytelling program called Sleep 30. One of our storytelling pillars was around health and wellness. We knew from data that a lot of people were asking questions about sleep and there was a lot of confusion about it. Sleep Number is a leader in the sleep space, makes smart beds that help analyze your sleep, and collaborates with the Mayo Clinic on sleep science research. We knew we had an amazing bed that helps people sleep better from the sleep-tracking research, but people still have so many questions and are doing a lot of things during the day that may be sabotaging their sleep without realizing it. We took those insights and created a free online sleep wellness program called Sleep30. It’s a week-by-week plan that gives tips to improve your sleep. This free program helped generate leads for the business and we got good feedback from people who went through it. It gives them so much value. Customers don’t have to be a Sleep Number bed owner to participate, and it’s a great way to reengage existing customers. Action Guide: Put the information Sarah shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links: Listen to Sarah’s Marketing With Empathy podcast or search for it wherever you listen to podcasts Learn more about brand storytelling on Sarah’s website Connect with Sarah on LinkedIn Innovation Quote “Don’t compare your beginning or middle to someone else’s end.”  – attributed to Tony Robbins 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

A process for improving product roadmapping using Objectives and Key Results – for product managers Today we are talking about roadmaps. Some product people love roadmaps, while a lot hate them. What can make them better? Our guest has had good experience creating roadmaps from objectives and key results (OKRs), and he is going to tell us how. That guest is Michael Harrison. He is the Head of Product Management for Fleetio, a SaaS company that automates fleet operations to keep vehicles and equipment running smoothly. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:11] What are approaches to product roadmaps have you used? As Fleetio has scaled, the needs of our roadmap have changed a lot. When we were small—seven employees—we operated on a project-based roadmap, a series of features with goals and timelines for when we hope to deliver those. That worked pretty well. When we were small, it kept us focused and we could afford major changes in direction. Now, as we’ve evolved, we need more of an outcome-based roadmap because it naturally keeps us more aligned as we get bigger. [3:58] What led you to incorporate OKRs into your roadmaps? The first change we made was switching to more theme-based roadmaps. Having narratives for product strategy is inspiring and allows the go-to-market side of the organization align with product more easily. We found if you just select roadmap themes and put them on a yearly cadence, it’s hard to judge relative priority among themes and choose a cap for how many themes you should have. If you’re a customer-led organization, almost every idea is a pretty good idea. The question is, what are the best ideas? For the last two quarters, we’ve been doing OKR roadmaps, and it forces us to make sure everything we’re building ties up directly to our company’s objective. It forces us to think about relative priority because we can only choose a couple of things to ladder up to the top company objectives. You  need narratives, but you also need some cap on how those narratives tie to your strategy and how to measure which ones are making a difference. [6:46] Have you found times when the strategic objective wasn’t the most helpful thing to guide OKRs? Yes, how you are going to pick the right things is the principal challenge of roadmaps. Not all your ideas are going to work. Think of the product team more like the marketing half of your organization—half of your ad dollars will be wasted; you just don’t know which half yet. The question is which things will have the most impact and can you reduce the impact of the things you’re going to get wrong? The OKR structure has given us a way to measure the impact of things. We don’t just have a flurry of activity each quarter. We have a flurry of activity in specific categories that are measurable. [8:16] What is your process for roadmapping with OKRs? I think of our process as a four-layer ladder. We tie everything the company is doing up to five unchanging OKRs at the top level, for example our annually recurring revenue (ARR) is our North Star metric. We also have metrics for retention and expansion. That’s level one—company strategy. Underneath that in level two, we think about what the product needs to do over the next year. What do we need to get better at? What kind of mission do we need to be on for the product to drive revenue, retention, and expansion? Level three is what can we do this quarter? That’s where time bounds are very important because we’re planning where we want to be by the end of the quarter. That’s our outcome-based roadmap. What does the product need to achieve for users? What leading indicators can we measure that would tell us we’re driving the level-two product mission. Level four is our roadmap. Those are the ideas, experiments, and features. These are loosely held ideas, hypotheses that can drive our convictions that ladder up to the top. [16:05] What other benefits have you seen with creating the OKR project? A lot of product leaders listening can probably empathize with the idea that we lose sleep over the opportunity cost of our decisions. When we get bigger and have bigger teams, it is such a frustrating feeling if you don’t feel in control or don’t know the main direction the organization is rowing in. Having this OKR structure gives me a way to feel like our activity is rowing in a direction I believe in and can trust. It’s not a series of disconnected teams I have to check in with to make sure they’re on course. It helps me sleep better at night knowing our activity is going in a consistent direction. It helps me coach product managers, designers, and engineers on the autonomy of what they’re building. It gives us a way to know we’re only a couple of weeks away at most from measuring what we’re doing, and we can’t dig a hole too deep before we realize we weren’t supposed to go in that direction. It’s a safety net that allows us to test our hypotheses. I’m in less emotional conversations about ideas. People feel like they have their beloved ideas that they really want to execute, but we can analyze an idea with a little bit more of a systematic approach because we know we’ll have a way to measure it, and our process is more important than our outcome. [18:42] What metrics do you use? We separate leading metrics and lagging metrics at the levels of the OKR structure. We have our North Star metrics like net revenue retention. Then at level two in our product mission, we almost always use lagging metrics. At level three, when we start getting into quarterly outcome, we need a leading metric that we are hypothesizing will move our lagging metric over time. At level three, you should be able to measure your metric every day and have it be meaningful. When we choose a metric, we try to play out the game. I call them pre-mortems. We write what would happen if we hit this metric or what would happen if we didn’t hit this metric. If it just leads to more questions, we’ve probably chosen a poor metric. [22:00] Tell us more about your pre-mortem. We have a written product culture. Something I believe in is that you build your convictions through writing, and I want product managers to be compelling persuasive writers. One of the template items in our product briefs that our product managers write is, What are the key beliefs? What are you operating within? What is your hypothesis? One of the reasons we write that is so we can be systematic to say there are ways this could fail. There are things we might be overlooking. There is a belief we’re operating within, and we’re not 100% certain this will go right. I try to probe teams to explore what could go wrong. What are the scenarios in which you would know you’re on the wrong path? It’s extremely important to know those things ahead of time because once you’re in the middle of executing your idea, you have a subjective bias because you’ve put sunk cost and emotional cost into what you’re building. We try to think of those things long before we’re building. [24:30] What challenges are you still encountering with product roadmaps? Two things happen when you’re very metrics-based: You pick bad metrics sometimes and you may have a tendency to make fewer major swings, to be less ambitious as a product team. If you’re outcome-based, you want as many green metrics as possible, so you try to make something more achievable. The I’m trying to push against that is using one of my favorite principles from game theory: What do you win when you win? I want design metrics so that if we actually hit the metric, we’re thrilled. Sometimes that would be a metric we aren’t likely to hit, but if you have a 10% chance of hitting a 50x outcome, that’s a bet you should take. Something I’d love to see us get better at as we design metrics is sometimes we need to take really ambitious swings because the payoff is worth the effort. Action Guide: Put the information Michael shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links: Learn more about Fleetio Connect with Michael on LinkedIn Innovation Quote “As our island of knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.” – John Wheeler   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

A framework for digital transformation – for product managers Today we are talking about digital transformation and why it matters to product managers and leaders. Tim Bottke is an Associate Professor of Practice in Digital Transformation at SDA Bocconi School of Management in Milan, Italy. He is also a Senior Partner at Deloitte Germany, specializing in digital transformation. Tim has more than 22 years of top management consulting and digital transformation experience, working with clients in more than 20 countries. He is also author of the new book, Digital Transformation Payday: Navigate the Hype, Lower the Risks, Increase Return on Investments. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [1:54] What is digital transformation and why does it matter? It’s a good question with a not-so-easy answer.  There’s not much of a common definition of what digital transformation is all about. It’s a transformation process toward digital. It’s just one tool that can help companies transform. It needs a good product to succeed. Just to say something is digital doesn’t make it any better. You need to find something that is better than the competition and is fulfilling customer needs. Digital can be a great help in making this happen but it’s not the solution in itself. Digital transformation is about the strategy you follow, because if you don’t know where you’re going, you spend a lot of money for digital hype buzzword technology that is not making any customer more happy or any product more profitable. Digital transformation is not an objective by itself. It’s a means to an end, and if no one has thought about what the end should be, it’s probably not a good idea. [5:59] What is an example of a successful digital transformation? Let’s take the example of a telecom company. In a traditional business model, if a customer had an issue with the product they had to call the call center or walk into a shop. Sometimes the people can help, but sometimes the customer has a terrible experience. If this experience is transformed to digital-first, the customer opens an app on the smartphone and does everything themselves—no human intervention and no possibility for anyone messing up in the process. As product specialists, you should think about the segments you want to serve. In many markets, you have segments that are not digitally savvy, and for them some of these transformations can lead to a worse experience, because there would be fewer people in the call center or the people in the shop would no longer be trained to help. If you want to serve your larger customer base, every product needs to accommodate not just the digitally savvy people. Many other industries are following the telecom industry. Take the car industry. Car companies never had any end-customer connection. They produced cars and gave them to retail networks, and only the retail networks had direct customer interaction. That’s now changing. More manufacturers are doing direct sales, and all the new companies like Tesla are thinking about their product end-to-end, including the sales journey, and taking full control of everything. As more and more subscription-based models come into place for more and more products, the companies really need to know their end customers. By selling directly, they suddenly have data, When I started working in the telecom industry, we walked into stores and watched people buying things to see how they behave. The more digital everything becomes, people think data can replace that customer interaction, but data never show emotions.  If you don’t know how it feels to buy this product, you shouldn’t do a strategy for the product, because probably you’ll be terribly wrong, and no data on this planet will help you if you don’t do customer research in parallel. [15:45] Can you share your framework for how to do a digital transformation project? I know every consultant just loves having frameworks, but that’s not the reason I put a framework in the book. You can use any framework as long as it shows an end-to-end journey. For my framework, I use the analogy of a chemical experiment. Digital transformation is a big experiment with an unclear outcome, but many of these experiments fail—some say 70% or 80%. Strategy: Before you set out, design what you want to achieve with the experiment. You need a strategy. That sounds obvious, but you wouldn’t believe how many experiments are started without anyone thinking even for 10 minutes how they will use this to win in the marketplace. The strategy tells you how to win together. Often people wrongly think they don’t need strategy because the work is digital. Or they just play to play, not to win. That’s not what business is all about. Catalysts: Catalysts make the experiment run. Are there new technologies that can make your experiment run at the speed you want? Is there a change in customer demand patterns? Is there a change of skills in your organization? Are there new sources of funding? In the book you’ll find many types of catalysts, which you need to be aware of to see whether the experiment will start. The Reactant: This is the scope of what you’re doing. Often companies say they’re doing digital transformation, but the scope is at the frontier of the business. Only a single product or process has been transformed, e.g, the front end of the web shop. The core business needs to be transformed if there are catalysts for doing that. Reaction Mechanism: Are you Agile? Often companies think they are Agile but are not because they just Agilize parts of the business. Often product managers start being Agile, and it ends when they release the product, because it doesn’t help to be Agile in just one corner. Experiment Outcome: Can you measure the value you generate for a company with digital transformation? Often people say you can’t measure value created by digital, but you can and should. Only then will the translation to value for the company come. The key to this framework is it’s about going end-to-end and not just thinking about one area. [23:40] How can we have an appropriate scope or reactant that will get momentum without being too overwhelming? Often companies try to find a scope but don’t think about how that translates back to the core business. It’s not about doing everything at once. Instead, start somewhere where it’s easier to succeed and think about how to translate that back to your company. Product people should be on the forefront of digital transformation, and they have the duty to think beyond a small area about the bigger implications and how they can help make that happen. Action Guide: Put the information Tim shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links: Learn more about Tim and the SDA Bocconi School of Management Check out Tim’s book, Digital Transformation Payday Learn more about Deloitte Innovation Quote “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.” – H.L. Mencken 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 leaders can drive purpose and belonging 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 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 gave a keynote on “Reimagining Engagement in Product Development and Management: A Masterclass on the Employee Experience in the Future of Work.” Employee engagement remains very low, and everyone wants more of it. What seems to be missing from the conversation is an understanding of the science behind engagement. I want to learn how engagement is so connected to creativity and innovation, and I bet you do to. Dr. Brad Shuck is an internationally recognized and sought-after thought-leader in the areas of employee engagement, leadership, and organizational culture. He is the author of Employee Engagement: A Research Overview (Routledge, 2020). He routinely works with leaders throughout the public and private sectors, and his insights are widely applied in the world’s largest Fortune 500 and Fortune 50 companies, as well as small- and medium-sized organizations seeking to grow and empower employees at all levels. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [3:19] What is employee engagement? We define engagement as maintenance, intensity, and direction of effort given to something. Employee engagement is what one gives at work, in a job or to a project. We can apply those ideas to spaces like creativity, innovation, and development and look at engagement from a variety of perspectives. Maintenance is the ability to maintain putting energy into something. How willing am I to stick this out? Intensity is how much one is willing to give. Am I willing to do things differently to be part of this? When people are really engaged in something their level of energy is intense. Directionality separates employee engagement from other job attitudes like commitment or satisfaction, which have a sense of status quo. Engagement has a driving force that pulls us forward. Belief is a really powerful force in engagement. Belief has an emotional connection. Our beliefs drive our behaviors. When we believe in a product or an innovation, when we’re sold out to an idea, engagement happens naturally because there’s some sense of belief and purpose in what we’re doing. [9:13] You take an evidence-based approach to improving employee engagement. What does that mean? We use science to drive decision-making. My job as a research faculty member at the University of Louisville is to do primary research, running field surveys ad talking to people. We do mixed methods research—blending qualitative and quantitative research. From that we derive insights that help us understand what steps leaders should be taking today. Using an evidence-based strategy helps leaders make evidence-based decisions. [12:04] What can product leaders do to improve employee engagement? Build a community around you. Be intentional. Culture and engagement don’t happen by accident. There’s a narrative you can use to drive engagement. There are two areas of currency right now around culture and engagement: purpose and belonging. Having a direct line of sight to work that is meaningful and knowing how my work impacts the end product are important. Belonging has everything to do with how I see myself here. Do I fit here? Is this a place I can be myself? Am I part of the team? There are messages we get that build over time and tell us whether we really belong here or not. Is this a place I can raise my hands in meetings and give my best ideas? Or maybe I’ll just keep those to myself. As a leader, you’ll see disengagement. Sometimes it looks like physically pushing back from the table in a meeting or someone who is normally vocal staying quiet. Investigate those things. Driving that sense of purpose and belonging is absolutely critical to driving engagement. [15:31] What suggestions do you have to drive belonging? I love the idea of pizza parties, but it’s not the pizza; it is the intentionality behind it. We’re gathering together to just get to know one another. We just happen to be having pizza. Helping people know they belong is often rooted in things that are easy to do but easy to not do. It’s a simple recognition that says, “Hey, I see you and I value you.” That can come in the form of an email: “You did a really great job in this meeting. Thanks for speaking up.” Somebody spoke words of encouragement to me today at the PDMA conference. They didn’t have to take their time to do that. That’s a gift for me. Now I’m thinking, “Maybe I need to become a PDMA member. Maybe this is a place that I could belong.” We need to almost overcommunicate that sense of belonging to new employees. Maybe they get a box of swag from us, which is about helping them know we’ve anticipated their arrival and there’s an expectation for them to be part of something. Those kinds of things not only build engagement but also build a sense of loyalty and pride in the team. People say things like, “I’m proud to work here.” [19:29] Product VPs and other leaders may feel lonely, like they don’t have anyone they can talk to who understands their work and problems. How can we help with loneliness? Community is really important here. I was talking to the senior vice president of a very large tech company about helping with activities for an offsite retreat. I started to go through a list of activities, and then I mentioned that leadership can sometimes be really lonely. I could see her facial expression completely change, and she said, “We’ve got to talk about this. Can you talk about loneliness to my team?” And that’s what we did. What was scheduled as a 90-minute session turned into a four-hour listening session, asking, “How are you? Are things okay? What are you doing to care for yourself? How are you pouring into your bucket, because you’re pouring a lot into each other.” We ended the conversation saying, “This team here has to know, each individual member has to know they can come to anybody on this team and you’ll have their back, that there’s a sense of community, that this team is aligned. If you don’t have that, you’re working on islands. That sounds really for good for a week. The longer that goes on the more isolated we feel.” I think right now there are a lot of leaders and employees who are lonely. This is why purpose and belonging are such critical factors in driving culture and engagement. Make sure you’re being inclusive in group events. Make sure you invite people who need to know they belong. Many times I assume someone knows they are invited, but it’s really important to invite people. Tell them, “We’re going to do X. Do you want to come with us?” even if you think they know they’re welcome. It’s okay if somebody says no. It only matters that you extend the invitation. [25:00] What else should we know about improving employee engagement? Engagement is a long game. Engagement and culture, which is how it feels to work somewhere, develop over time. Use data to help drive decision-making. Make sure those data are valid and reliable, i.e., you can trust the data. Action Guide: Put the information Brad shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links: Visit Brad’s website Connect with Brad on LinkedIn or Twitter 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