Product Mastery Now for Product Managers, Leaders, and Innovators

How product managers can align stakeholders on product projects Today we are talking about the need for product leaders to manage stakeholders and the associated challenges this creates. Aligning the perspectives of stakeholders on a product project is desirable as well as difficult. Helping us with this difficult task is Bruce McCarthy. Previously, Bruce joined us for a three-part series on creating and using product roadmaps. He is the co-author of the book Product Roadmaps Relaunched: How to Set Direction While Embracing Uncertainty. He is currently working on a new book project, co-authoring Aligned: Stakeholder Management for Product Leaders. He is also the co-founder of Product Culture—one of his customers said about Bruce, “Coach, trusted advisor, organizational therapist—like me, you’ll probably hire Bruce because of his experience in product management or his skills as an Agile coach.” What a great quote. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [7:13] How did you move from focusing on roadmaps to focusing on stakeholder management? When we wrote Product Roadmaps Relaunched, we knew just producing a roadmap is not the goal for product management teams. The goal is alignment of the team. As part of a workshop on roadmaps, I was briefly covering tips for gaining alignment, and someone told me, “I really enjoyed the workshop on roadmaps, but we need a workshop on alignment. This is the stuff nobody teaches. This is the stuff that allows you to take any framework, any bunch of data, any existing team, and glue it together.” I came to the realization this person was right. It’s the hidden skill of being able to influence without having authority that is the difference between a product manager who would seem on paper to tick all the boxes and one who’s really going to be successful. If you’re a product manager, you cannot issue orders, so you have to influence people. You can’t say, “This is where we’re going,” so you have to convince people where you should be going. [10:49] What are the challenges that leaders face in getting other senior leadership in the organization aligned around feature prioritization? Making good decisions is not the challenge; the challenge is getting people aligned with those decisions so you’re not constantly second-guessing or shifting priorities. If there’s a lot of disagreement on which features come first, that reveals there is not good alignment on goals—not the what but the why. Everyone has their point of view, and it’s up to you as the product manager to articulate not the ordered list of features but your vision for the future of the product, why it’s so great for the customer and the company, and how you will measure success with dollars and cents for the company. Given those assumptions, the priority list becomes much easier to agree on. You can still argue a little bit, but now you’re debating the best solution to the problem because you’ve agreed on the problem. [17:51] What can product leaders do to create stakeholder alignment? It’s easy to think you agree because you’re using the same words when you don’t actually agree, or to think you’re not agreeing when you’re using different words to mean the same thing. It’s helpful to think about stakeholders as a type of customer. For decades, product managers have been told they need to understand the customer, and they’ve been taught a lot of skills in customer discovery, but they forget all about that when they’re talking to people inside the company. That’s a mistake. We segment customers. We can also segment stakeholders. In the company, we have different departments, functions, and levels of authority. I’ve developed the TIPS Framework to classify stakeholders into four categories: Team—people who are working on the product day-to-day Impacted—people who are impacted by the decisions you make, e.g., customer support people Power players—people who are not in the direct line of authority for anybody on your team but whose judgement is considered by the executive team Subject experts—people who have knowledge you need even if they’re not interested in your product, e.g., legal team Make a canvas, just like a business canvas, to figure out whom you should be talking to. Go to them and do a customer discovery interview. Instead of just showing your roadmap and asking them to sign off, ask about their business and job. Ask what success looks like to them and where they’re struggling. Goals specific to a person’s role are obvious and easy to talk about, e.g., they need to generate a certain number of leads. What’s harder to talk about are people’s personal needs, yet we talk about those with customers too. It’s the same with stakeholders. If you know someone wants a promotion, you can position your product as something that will make them more visible as a successful contributor to something awesome. [24:22] Do you have a story you can share with us about stakeholder alignment? First I have a disaster story. I created my first software product as a product manager, Letter Builder. It was an online print and mail shop in the 90’s before anything like that existed. It was a total utter flop, doomed from the start. It was not doomed because the customer didn’t care. I did a bunch of research, and I think there was an opportunity for product-market fit there. And it wasn’t that the product didn’t work. It was that we didn’t have product-company fit. We were two weeks from launch and I went to ask the VP of marketing what the promotional plan was, but before I could ask, she asked me what the promotional plan was. I spluttered for a minute and came up with a few ideas the marketing team could do. She stopped me and said, “You don’t understand, Bruce. My team’s time and budget are completely allocated to promoting our core product that we’ve had for years. Your new product sounds great, but I have no budget or time for that.” I stumbled out of there not knowing what I was going to do and spoke to the Head of the Sales. It was the same story. The comp plan was set and we were not going to change it, so they had no interest in selling the product. I stumbled from there to lunch with the president and CEO who were taking me to lunch to celebrate that I was about to ship the product, and their first question was, “What are your expectations for the product?” And it was a very quiet lunch. The product went absolutely nowhere. I learned a lot about what not to do or rather what I needed to do that I had neglected to do about getting stakeholder alignment. [27:27] Can you share a success story? Chase Morsey joined the product planning team at Ford Motor Company right after World War II, and he was super excited because he’d been a Ford driver his whole life and loved the Ford V-8 engine. When he joined, he discovered they were going to discontinue making V-8s because the procurement and finance team had decided they were too expensive and unprofitable. Chase went to his boss and said, “I think this is a huge mistake. People buy the car because of the V-8.” His boss said, “You might be right, but all the executives are aligned on this plan. What are you going to do about it?” Chase decided he was going to do something about it. He did the first market research Ford had ever done with customers to find out why they bought a Ford or a Chevy, which was the main competitor at the time. He went to the dealers and confirmed they all felt the V-8 was their only weapon against the Chevy, because the Ford was slightly more expensive. Chase bought a Chevy and had the team pull it apart and source all the parts. They discovered the Chevy V-6’s parts were slightly more expensive than the Ford V-8’s parts. Chase talked to manufacturing and found they were working on a plan for more efficient assembly and could reduce the cost of assembly. They worked out that they could make the V-8 for $50 less per unit than Chevy was making their V-6. Chase worked with all the departments—marketing, sales, dealers, customers, finance team, procurement team, and manufacturing team—and he synthesized a plan for making more money on the V-8 rather than less. He went to the executive team and presented everything. The executives kept questioning him and his assumptions, and every time they did, somebody from another department stood up and said, “No, he’s right. We did the analysis.” It took all day, but the executives eventually had to back down and uncancel the V-8, which went on to become the motor for the Mustang, the Thunderbird, and every other well-known Ford. Chase not only saved those cars but also might have saved the company from extinction. If we could all aspire to be like Chase Morsey, we’d have a really strong product culture in our companies. Action Guide: Put the information Bruce shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links: Visit ProductCulture.org Join the Early Reader Club of Aligned: Stakeholder Management for Product Leaders Join Product Culture’s Roadmapping Masterclass and get 40% off with code 40BY2023 Innovation Quote “A true leader is not a searcher for consensus but a molder of consensus.” – Martin Luther King, Jr. 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 go beyond the obvious in VOC PDMA invited me to their conference, which was in Orlando, Florida, to interview some of their speakers. This speaker spoke on The Key to Successful Voice of the Customer (VOC) in Agile Teams. 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. Agile teams need to know what they are developing, and VOC is a tool for understanding what customers need. However, traditional VOC doesn’t meld well with development accomplished in a series of sprints. We’ll discuss how to get more benefits from VOC in Agile teams. We are with Kristyn Corrigan. Kristyn is a principal and co-owner of Applied Marketing Science, a Boston-based market research consultancy that helps companies develop better products and services through harnessing the power of customer insights. She specializes in helping companies understand stated and latent customer needs through in-depth interviewing and ethnographic observation. She also trains companies to create and implement their own in-house Voice of the Customer programs. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:38] What is Voice of the Customer (VOC)? There’s a temptation to think of VOC as any type of customer data, but when we think about VOC in a more systematic sense and fueling product development and innovation, we’re thinking about an in-depth understanding of customer needs. What is the customer trying to accomplish? What is the job to be done? What problems are our customers looking to solve? What things are important to them that the market isn’t currently delivering on? Effective VOC is understanding your customers in an in-depth way and getting beyond the obvious. [5:50] Can you talk about the friction that happens with VOC and time-box sprints? Systematic voice of the customer is uncovering a complete set of customer needs that are prioritized by customers. Ideally, this process happens as early as possible in the stage-gate process, but it takes months and months to accomplish. That is in direct conflict with Agile teams’ working on tight timeframes and constantly iterating. These Agile teams might already have a product concept or prototype and still need customer insights. How can we infuse VOC into those moments and get meaningful customer insights? The aim is to be able to fail quickly. To do this, we need three pillars. [7:34] Tell us about the three pillars of using VOC with Agile. The first pillar is planning. The first part of planning is answering the question, “Who are the types of customers we really need to get feedback from?” The second part is figuring out what you’re going to have customers react to, which is the minimum viable stimulus. You want to show customers something that’s really easy to change. Don’t be too attached to a prototype. The second pillar is asking the right questions to get beyond the obvious and get the information we need. Showing the customer a minimum viable stimulus and asking, “Would you purchase this product?” gets us a yes or no answer and does nothing for the development or optimization of the product. Instead, we want to understand why or why not the concept or prototype is appealing. We want to dig deeper to understand the individual features of the concept or prototype, what’s most appealing, what’s least appealing, and what jobs it accomplishes for our customers. We want to map back to customer needs. Ask, “Is the prototype accomplishing what you need it to do? What else could it potentially do? Did we miss anything big?” [12:14] Are there some general questions you like to ask customers? I love to ask customer to tell me stories. It’s a great way to organically get at the needs that may not be top-of-mind for them. I have them tell me about the last time they used a product or experienced a service. For example, I was consulting with a company that manufactures accessories for enteral feeding pumps. They were developing a new bag and set of lines for these pumps. We started an open-ended exploration of how patients and caregivers interact with the pumps. One of the biggest insights we gained was the prototype had a bag the food was stored in that was extremely crunchy. When people described the experience of using one of these devices in public, they talked about how self-conscious they were and how they didn’t want to draw attention to themselves. That was not something the company designed to when they made their prototype, but after talking with customers and understanding their emotions and the story around this product, they ended up completely changing the prototype. [16:09] What is the third pillar? The third pillar is backlog prioritization. Agile teams have a backlog of features they’re managing toward, and we want to make sure we’re keeping that in mind through our voice-of-the-customer process. As we’re talking to customers, which typically happens in sets of five to ten interviews, we want to be iterating the concept as often as we need to, and that involves reprioritizing things. We shouldn’t be afraid of going back and changing the way we talk about a particular aspect of the product or removing a feature and seeing what customers think then. [17:42] When do you do your five to ten VOC interviews? Typically I do the five to ten interviews once the minimum viable prototype or stimulus is created. You don’t have to wait until the interviews are done to make changes. Make adjustments to the backlog or concept as needed while the interviews are happening. You’ll know if you need to do another round of interviews if you’re hearing varied feedback. You may realize you have more than one market segment and the segment you thought would be your primary market is not the primary one, so you may want to change the types of customers you’re speaking to. [19:02] Do you do these interviews one-on-one or in a group setting? We’re not doing the traditional exploratory VOC where you’re talking to 30 customers and trying to get an exhaustive list of customer needs. Instead, our process is needs-focused around a minimum viable stimulus that the customer is reacting to. At the outset, we use screening criteria to profile the different types of customers we want to speak to. In the enteral feeding example I just talked about, we wanted to speak to patients, in-home caregivers, and professional caregivers. I find that for VOC interviews with Agile teams, one-on-one interviews are best. You’re able to dig deep with an individual customer to understand their experiences, stories, and emotions. In a group setting, there’s sometimes reluctance to go deep and customers have to share air time. [20:56] How do you set up the interviews? Before 2020, the majority of these interviews were in-person, often because there was something we wanted customers to touch and interact with. Now we’re increasingly doing these interviews virtually, which is great because people are comfortable virtually. The most important person to have present in the interview is a skilled moderator who will guide the conversation. It’s nice to have a second person there taking notes and providing prompts if the moderator misses something, but I recommend that one person lead the interview. Otherwise it can be a little overwhelming for respondents and start to feel like an interrogation if it’s a two-on-one situation. Sometimes we send products to customers ahead of the interviews, for example, the bag in the feeding pump example. [23:19] Is there anything else we need to know about prioritization? It’s important to do frequent check-ins with the team to prioritize the features of the concept, because it informs the types of questions you’ll ask other customers as you continue with interviews. Teams shouldn’t shy away from changing course and adjusting what they ask. These are qualitative conversations, not quantitative testing. You don’t have to ask every single customer the same exact questions and tally their responses. It’s an iterative process. [25:39] What should an Agile team do if it finds it has two different features in the backlog that seem contradictory? When teams are faced with contradictory specs or features, it’s great to have customer data to go back to. One possibility is to go back to the same customer and talk about it. If you can’t, perhaps you need to talk to other customers. I love having transcripts of interviews so you can go back and pinpoint details. The transcript is also a great tool to reference for marketing and sales language. Keeping the customer language is critical. [28:48] What is the different between a minimum viable product (MVP) and minimum viable stimulus (MVS)? I view MVP as the next step from MVS. The MVS is easier to change. We can’t be afraid to go back when we get it wrong and make adjustments. Once we have a product, we’ve already put a lot time, effort, and money into it, and it’s harder to kill that product if we need to. Action Guide: Put the information Kristyn shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links: Learn more about Applied Marketing Science Listen to episode 071 on VOC with Gerry Katz Thanks! Thank you for being an Everyday Innovator and learning with me from the successes and failures of product innovators, managers, and developers. If you enjoyed the discussion, help out a fellow product manager by sharing it using the social media buttons you see below. Source

How product managers can build authentic confidence Today we are talking about how to unleash confidence. As product professionals, we need authentic confidence. Joining us is Dr. Joan Rosenberg, a cutting-edge psychologist known for her work in communication, confidence, resilience, authenticity, and grief. She is frequently sought by media and companies to speak and train on these topics.  She is a clinical professor of psychology at Pepperdine University and author of several books including her most recent book, 90 Seconds to a Life You Love: How to Master Your Difficult Feelings to Cultivate Lasting Confidence, Resilience, and Authenticity. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:17] How does self-talk impact us? Negative self-talk comes under the category of harsh self-criticism, which is considerably more damaging than people believe. Most people think harsh self-criticism is equivalent to unpleasant feelings, but it’s not. Unpleasant feelings do nothing to sabotage ourselves, but harsh self-criticism is like dropping 10 or 20 stories in an elevator—it takes you down. Harsh self-criticism is a distraction from unpleasant feelings. We don’t control what we feel, but we do have a lot of control over how we think. When somebody gets upset, they quickly shift to harsh self-criticism, ostensibly to take control of the unpleasant feelings they were feeling. Harsh self-criticism is damaging and very severe. I think it promotes depression and plays a big role in people’s becoming suicidal. It’s one of the most damaging things people can do. The recommendation I make is to speak and act in the direction you want your results to be—positive not negative. [6:47] How can we build more authentic confidence? Building confidence for me came out of two important questions: How does somebody develop confidence? And what makes it difficult for people to deal with unpleasant feelings? Confidence is the deep sense that you can handle the emotional outcome of whatever you face or want to pursue. It’s not about positive feelings. It’s our ability to tolerate the challenges we face and the feelings that come with that. My focus is on eight unpleasant feelings: sadness shame helplessness anger vulnerability embarrassment disappointment frustration The foundational element to building confidence is to be able to experience and move through unpleasant feelings. The steps to confidence are: Experience and handle unpleasant feelings Speak up with ease Take action End harsh self-criticism Absorb compliments [9:52] How do we move through those unpleasant feelings? Most of us come to know what emotions we’re feeling through bodily sensation—tightness, heat, heaviness, etc. People find it so hard to deal with unpleasant feelings because we don’t want to deal with the bodily sensations. We distract ourselves. Instead, you want to ride the bodily sensation “waves.” When a feeling gets triggered, there is a rush of biochemicals into the bloodstream that activate the bodily sensations, and they flush out of the bloodstream in 90 seconds. If you can just breathe into the process as you’re experiencing a feeling, you can stay present in the feeling and link up your feeling with your thinking to help you make decisions and take action or express yourself so you can make use of the feelings. When you stub your toe, you’re in pain for a moment. You take a deep breath and hold on to that toe till the pain subsides. Similarly, when you have a quick emotional reaction, if you take some deep breaths, you stay present in the experience, and it’s always going to subside. [15:46] How do we speak up and express ourselves with ease? People don’t experience unwavering confidence until they’re able to speak with ease. That means you can say what you to say with whom you need to say it when, where, and how you need to say it. It has to come out in a kind and well-intentioned manner. Difficulty speaking up is not a speaking problem; it’s a difficulty with unpleasant feelings. When you first start speaking, you’re trying to deal with your own emotional discomfort. Then, you have to be willing to experience the other person’s discomfort. If you don’t handle unpleasant feelings, you’ll have a reluctance to speak up. It’s super important that you understand that your growth and greater ability to speak with ease is going to come the more you develop your capacity to handle unpleasant feelings. [22:01] How do we take action? Both in speaking up and in taking action, you’re not confident, and then you do it and become confident. If I want to learn how to play tennis, and other people will be watching, I go play tennis and then develop the confidence. Repeatedly taking action and handling the emotional outcome build confidence. [23:57] How do we end harsh self-criticism? Harsh self-criticism is unbelievably damaging, and it’s a distraction from unpleasant feelings. It’s an effort for you to take control of that process. Breathe and be aware of what you’re doing. Make a conscious effort to stop it or go back to what unpleasant feeling prompted you to talk to yourself in that manner. Think about what was hard for you to think, feel, know, or bear that prompted you to beat yourself up. Think, speak, and act in the direction you want your results to be. You don’t want negative results, so you shouldn’t be talking to yourself in a harsh way. [25:46] How do we absorb compliments instead of deflecting them? Compliments are like a reflection. When people give you a compliment, they’re holding up a mirror to you, and when you dismiss them, not only are you dismissing the other person’s reality, you’re dismissing your own reality. When you get compliments, especially repeated compliments, and absorb them, you’re leveling up or updating your sense of self-image. If you don’t do that, you stay hooked into the same self-image you have held of yourself. People tell me they don’t want to get arrogant, but the people who seem arrogant actually feel inadequate or insecure. People who feel good about themselves have no need to tell you. Many people will think a compliment is insincere if they give insincere compliments. Hear the compliment and trust it is sincere. If you give insincere compliments, stop that practice and say what you really mean. Action Guide: Put the information Joan shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links: Visit Joan’s website Check out Joan’s book, 90 Seconds to a Life You Love Innovation Quote “We disappoint our way to success. We don’t succeed alone.” – Dr. Joan Rosenberg Thanks! Thank you for being an Everyday Innovator 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

Apply to join the Product Mastery Now Community — Application deadline is November 28th. Product managers, take note—the value of adding a community to your product Today we are talking about the value of community. Some products are started as a community while other products add a community aspect later. Of course, many products exist without a community, but that may be missing opportunities. Let’s find out together how community can benefit products. Joining us is Patrick Woods. He is co-founder and CEO of Orbit, the leading community growth platform. He’s worked with business leaders from some of the world’s fastest growing businesses to leverage the power of community. He’s the co-creator of the Orbit Model, host of the Developer Love podcast, and author of the Brand Strategy Canvas. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [3:38] What does community mean? I like to define communities based on the expectations of community members. In this framework, there are three types of communities: product, practice, and play. In a community of play, members come together to have a good time. This could be folks who get together to play basketball on Saturday afternoons. The sole purpose is to have fun, meet each other, and have a good time. In a community of practice, members learn about a skill or discipline. This could be a Discord community for CTOs. The goal is to get better at something, to network, and to skill up. In a community of product, folks come together to get better at and talk about a specific product. The Orbit community has users who come together to talk about how to more effectively use the tool. Communities are often a blend of practice and product. [9:26] What is the value of communities for companies? An active and healthy community de-risks and accelerates almost every part of the business. What better way to drive awareness for your product than to have an army of thousands or tens of thousands of people eagerly talking about your product? An active community drives adoption and onboarding because you have customers willing to answer other customers’ questions, which increases retention. A community helps with product discovery, since you can get feedback easily. You can recruit new employees from a community. [12:24] What are your insider secrets for starting a community successfully? Part of my answer will sound philosophical and part will sound tactical. When you start a community, you can think of the process like a customer discovery process. Ask questions like, What’s the market like? Who are my potential customers? What is the overlap between the things the community needs and the things I can provide? Get specific with that. Having a community because everyone has one is not a strong case for a community. Before launching your own community, spend time in other adjacent communities. Learn what the conversation are like, what challenges and themes come up again and again, and how people talk in that space. Find gaps in the market and build credibility. By that point, you’ll have a positioning map of how your community is going to be different and why it matters to your prospective audience. To gain interest, produce a series of event around your market need. Now you’re creating value for your potential community members. Invite people in those adjacent communities to the events. Then, you can onboard them to your community. To create a successful community, first ask yourself, what value can I create for these people? Some people treat their community as nothing more than a source of data. That’s a very short-term view on what a community can be. Create value for your community members and you will capture value too. [19:20] How do you craft trust in your community, especially if you’re disclosing things you would not want to fall into the hands of a competitor? We lead with trust. We don’t really do NDAs when we’re talking about features or roadmaps. Most of these folks are people we’ve met over the years and had dinner with at conferences. They feel almost like part of the family. [22:15] What resources do we need in place so the community doesn’t fall apart? You can think of this as a hierarchy of needs. At the bottom is the fundamental question of who is out there and what are they doing. This is the first problem we had to solve with Orbit, which is a platform for community growth. Our customers have huge communities online spread across a ton of platforms—a support forum, Discord for live chat, GitHub for code, social media. etc. Many community leaders found it hard to asses the health of the community because the data is siloed across so many platforms. It’s hard to understand the individual customer’s journey without Orbit. With Orbit, you can see that Patrick followed you on Twitter a month ago, created a trial of the product the next day, came to your forum that same day and asked a bunch of questions, sent a tweet about how awesome that was the next day, and converted to a paying customer a week later. If you can see that journey at the individual level, you can roll it up into all sorts of aggregate views as well. We want to disambiguate user accounts on platforms to actual humans so our users can understand the people in their communities. We have a metric called love, which might sound hippie or silly, but for us love is a thing you can measure, and it’s a function of the recency, frequency, and quality of a person’s participation in the community. If you’re not careful, it can decay over time. We observed that love as a concept is important because not every activity is created equal. Someone following you on Twitter is nice, but someone attending your customer advisory board meeting month after month is much more meaningful. Measuring love is a mechanism for understanding the shape of your community. We measure community growth and look at community-qualified leads and revenue attribution to the community, e.g., if someone is active in the forum, are they more likely to convert to a paying customer? Orbit can help you answer these types of questions and drive better decision making about how to resource the community. The bottom of the hierarchy of needs is bringing visibility to all these different people. Over time, that data can turn into insights, and the insights can turn into actions and programs. For example, Orbit can show you the ten new active people in your community, and you can send them a Twitter DM welcoming them to the community. Action Guide: Put the information Patrick shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links: Learn more about Orbit’s open-source model Learn more about Orbit Connect with Patrick on Twitter @patrickJwoods Innovation Quote “The counterfeit innovator is wildly self-confident. The real one is scared to death.”– Steven Pressfield, The War of Art Thanks! Thank you for being an Everyday Innovator and learning with me from the successes and failures of product innovators, managers, and developers. If you enjoyed the discussion, help out a fellow product manager by sharing it using the social media buttons you see below. Source

Lessons from launching a #2 Product of the Year on Product Hunt – for product managers Today we are talking about getting attention for your product launch. Joining us is a co-founder who got his product to #1 Product of the Day, #1 Product of the Week, and a finalist for Product of the Year on Product Hunt. That’s a lot of attention. His name is Ken Babcock, and he is the Co-founder and CEO of Tango. Tango allows you to simply create step-by-step tutorials of anything you do in a web browser or on your computer desktop—it simplifies creating instructions or workflows.  Prior to Tango, Ken spent most of his career in the Bay Area at Uber, where he held roles in Launch Operations, Data Science, and Product Strategy.  Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [3:12] What insight or problem led you to create Tango? I met my co-founders, Brian and Dan, at Harvard Business School. When we met, we kept talking about team performance. One of the barriers to high performance is creating documentation. It gets outdated quickly, and when it is outdated, people tend to ping you and ask you to update it. The emotions associated with teams creating documentation, which is a conduit to sharing knowledge, were very negative. We thought about how we could shift that to a more positive experience and cut down on pain points. It takes a long time to create documentation. How could we make this passive? Could we make it something people do in the flow of their work? You go through your process and we create the documentation for you. I reflected on my Uber experience, where I was on a launch operations team. We took what we learned from cities we had already launched in and applied it to cities we were about to launch in. It was a constant recalibration of our best practices. [7:48] How do you think about the strategy for getting attention for a new product launch? Your strategy has to be within the context of what your product is. It all comes back to the product you’re offering and the value proposition to the end user. We were a product-led company, meaning people would download the Chrome extension we’ve built and use it to solve their day-to-day tasks. We were speaking directly to those end users. The call to action was, “You need to go download this because you’re spending too much time creating documentation.” Make sure all those pieces are tight—you understand what you’re selling, the typical emotion, who your customers are, and how they find your product. Product Hunt is not one-size-fits-all. Product Hunt is a great way for early product adopters and end users of technology to find tools. Our strategy informed our decision to launch on Product Hunt because that’s where we were going to meet a lot of customers. To start the conversation, you have to know who the people you’re communicating with on launch are. [10:54] Take us through the specifics of launching on Product Hunt and getting a product to the top of the charts. On Product Hunt, every day a new batch of products launches, and those products get upvoted as people interact with them. There’s a #1 product of the day, week, month, and year. We got our product to the #2 Product of the Year, which was pretty cool. Product Hunt is a great way for new products to get visibility; it’s free marketing. To launch on Product Hunt, you upload a quick blurb on what it is and a few screenshots that walk through what the product does. Someone hunts your product. It’s a good signal if a strong hunter hunts your product. This is all geared toward getting attention and upvotes, because if you get upvotes, more people will see your product. Those blurbs and screenshots are not a lot to get people to understand the product. We had to be really tight on that messaging. We had to be very clear on what our product does, what it’s solving, and the impact it will have on the end user. Product Hunt is an all-day affair. We launched at midnight Pacific time, which gives time for Europe to interact with it. Our team was up around the clock pinging people they know and asking friends and beta users for upvotes. Product Hunt is a unique platform, but it’s phenomenal free marketing to a community that’s going to readily try your product and give great feedback. [15:03] What help did you have with creating messaging? When we launched, we had been in development for about a year, and we had brave, generous beta testers who were willing to try the product in exchange for giving us feedback. We listened to the vocabulary customers were using to see how the product was resonating with customers and used similar language in our messaging. [17:27] Tell us more about the hunters on Product Hunt. Product Hunt has tried to remove a little bit of the impact a hunter can have. It used to be there were super hunters, and if they gave you their stamp of approval, you were pretty much guaranteed to get in the top five for the day. When we launched, the role of hunters had diminished, but we had someone in our network, Clair Byrd, who was an exceptional marketer, and we involved her in the launch. She gave us a ton of good feedback. She told us to not frame our product as a vitamin—this will be good for you. You should frame it like a painkiller—you have a problem that needs to be solved now, and this product will solve it. [20:13] What campaign did you have in place for launch? We had about 200 beta testers. During development, we had been creating a waitlist and had captured emails. We listed our product as Upcoming on Product Hunt. We ran a big email campaign and segmented folks by what time zone they were in so it hit them right in the morning on the day of launch. We posted on LinkedIn and Twitter. We were getting as much free, organic marketing as possible. Built into the product is a collaborative loop. Documentation is a team sport, so you’re usually creating it so share with somebody else so they can replicate your process. The collaborative loop in our product led people to find Tango via Product Hunt. The people they shared it with would find it on Product Hunt. We had 1300 upvotes on the first day, and in two weeks we had 10,000 users of Tango, many from the collaborative loop. [23:17] What have you done to promote the product since launch? A year from when we launched, we’re at 175,000 users. Forty percent of those have come referral through the collaborative loop. We’ve remained diligent about thinking about the end user. User-generated content has been really powerful. TikTok has been a huge channel because it’s user-generated content, and Tango shows really well visually and can be shared in a short snippet. We’re always thinking about how we continue to speak to the customer, and often customers speaking to each other is the best thing you could ask for. [26:01] What are you doing to use user-generated content for marketing? Some of it is organic. We pay for sponsored contact on influencers’ channels. We collect user testimonials and have been writing up case studies. In the product, we ask for reviews on the Chrome store and G2. When power users get to a certain threshold, we ask them inside Tango if they would like to review Tango on the Chrome store or G2. We get as much of our marketing as possible from users and have the ability to get reviews built into our product. Action Guide: Put the information Ken shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide Useful link: Learn more about Tango Innovation Quote “Nothing is more damaging to an adventurous spirit than a secure future.” – Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild 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

Answering the questions that lead to optimal product pricing Today we are talking about how to price B2B SaaS products, learning from pricing examples. Joining us is Marcos Rivera, the author of the new book Street Pricing: A Pricing Playlist for Hip Leaders in B2B SaaS. Marcos is a pricing specialist with deep roots in product management, having served in roles from product manager to executive senior director for product management. He has leveraged his experience to specialize in pricing for the last several years and founded Pricing I/O to train and coach high-growth B2B SaaS companies on how to accelerate Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR).  Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:18] How did you find yourself moving from product management into SaaS product pricing and packaging? I started building products way back in the nineties and cut my teeth on creating and crafting products starting with basic integrations. Everything I built I had to price. It wasn’t easy. I had to dig deep and learn how to do it because the success of my product depended on it. I realized it’s not as formulaic as I thought it was. There’s not a spreadsheet that cranks out the optimal price. I realized there is a pattern and a way to understand value and capture it with pricing. [4:20] Can you take us through a story about product pricing? I worked closely with the company Mindbody, a fitness SaaS company. They raised prices without data or a good value story, and their customers reacted negatively. We had to step back and take a look at how we think about capturing value in cases where it’s warranted and whether we’re raising prices in cases where it’s not warranted. Most companies want to increase the number of customers and extract more value from the existing base, which is not easy to balance. For pricing and engagement, we go through the 5Q Framework. 5Q stands for five questions. The big question in your mind—how much should I charge?—is one of the last things to figure out. First, you have to understand what experience you’re pricing for, who’s buying your product, what their motivations are, and your purpose in pricing. Mindbody, which sells fitness plans and software for gyms, sold a few fitness plans, and you didn’t see a lot of differentiation between them. They had grown so much, they never thought how to layer value in their plans. I started pressing them on whom they really wanted to win. The yoga instructor who has a couple of clients? The massive chains like Orange Theory? And I asked why they wanted them. What’s the big play here? If you’re expanding your software, how are you expanding it? Where’s your value? They said they needed to grow market share and gain clients but at the same time lift the amount of dollars per client. They found some customers were paying very little for the value they were getting, others were paying the right amount, and the rest were overpaying. We needed to calibrate that. Step one was a neutral strategy, which is balancing the amount of pricing tactics used to get customers with the amount of money you’re getting. Step two was figuring out what customers they wanted. We wanted to make it easy for new yoga instructors who don’t have a lot of courses to come into the platform. We needed a leaner version to compete and give them something they needed, but not too lean, like a free offer, because we wanted commitment. We wanted another price point for growing gyms, and another one for mature gyms. Once we had nailed in the who, we worked on the what. They had new functionality and innovation and didn’t know what to do with them. We had to create different packages. Then, we extracted price points from three inputs. First, we did analysis on happy, inactive, and churned customers to see patterns in what they were paying. Second, we ran a survey to find out what aspects of the product people loved and were willing to pay a premium for. Third, we did a competitive deep dive, looking at competitors’ pricing. There’s not a single optimal number or a magic spreadsheet for pricing. You have to strategic with what you want, whom you want, the experience you want to give them, and how you want to capture that. [13:08]  Were there different ways of attracting customers in this case? Absolutely, the go-to-market piece is very important. You can have self-serve all the way to very guided sales-led motions. A yoga instructor is looking at the website and price and expecting understand whether it’s worth it for them. You have to be transparent in that sector, but also give them the ability to see what type of value framing they can get. They’re investing $49, but that’s less than the cost a full hour of training for a high-end instructor. Frame it the right way to lead them to click on buy now or start the free trial. If you frame it the right way, it doesn’t look expensive. As long as humans are buying from other humans, you have to take the psychology factor into play when it comes to pricing. Big enterprises buy differently from individuals. They have ROIs to justify, big budgets, and crazy parameters to stay within. Sales guys have to navigate all this. Giving them a good pricing frame and a zone they can stay in helps them see where those boundaries are and avoids rampant and random discounting, which leaves a lot of value on the table, makes it hard to raise prices later as you innovate more, and creates an artificial ceiling that’s hard for a PM to break through. Giving sales people parameters, a great starting point, and good value story are the key ways of winning the enterprise. [17:35] What are you 5Q questions? Why? Why are you creating this pricing? Who? Who is the customer you want to win? What? What is the offer mix? How? How much should we charge for this? Which? Which parts of pricing are working and which parts are not working? [18:54] What’s another example of pricing strategy? A company was having trouble selling their product, and removed the friction of commission calculations, which is a pretty heavy thing because you have to make sure you’re in compliance with the government. They were comparing their product to QuickBooks, which has a free or cheap plan, and this company was trying to command a much higher amount. Sales resorted to discounting to make deals happen, which led to a lot of churn—they’re not buying for value, they’re buying because it’s cheap, so they’ll find the next cheapest thing and move on. We reframed the value by breaking down the cost per rep. It was $3, not even the price of a cup of coffee. When people are spending money on something, they’re also thinking about what else they could spend money on. Am I getting the bang for the buck? By framing it differently, you increase value perception. There’s no trickery here, but you could be mistakenly making your product look more expensive and less reasonable by not properly framing. [21:50] What’s another example? Everyone thinks you have to have good, better, and best packages. Seventy-two percent of SaaS companies use this model. It’s a good model for a lot of reasons, but it’s not a good tool for companies that have a lot more variability in what they’re selling. There was a fintech firm that sold to banks everywhere from Zimbabwe to the UK. These banks had very different needs based on the economics and regulations of their countries, which created a lot of variability in what customers want. The good, better, best model has a progression laid out as customer move up in maturity. If you customers stay in one spot or grow in so many different ways they need a wide variety of packages, you can have a lot of dynamics that lead to over discounting and not being able to give customers the experience they want. If you create too many packages, it can get really confusing. We shifted the fintech company to a different model, called Core and More or Base Plus. Everyone starts at the same base function—checking, savings, and tracking account numbers and customers. Then you have nicely defined bolt-ons. It’s simple on the front, flexible on the back. You’re able to serve needs at a simpler starting point and create avenues for more complex needs. It eases tensions without trying to force somebody into a package. You’re able to give them a bit more of what they want and a price for growth. [26:45] What issues have you seen with founders guessing on product pricing? Pricing impacts 100% of your revenue, so it shocks me that companies spent about six hours last year talking about their pricing strategy. Founders know pricing is important, but they guess on it because they don’t have data or know what data to look at and they don’t have a framework. I have seen companies iterate and guess through pricing and land on a good model, but if you want to go down that path, it will take 18-24 months. We give you a direct and non-biased view of where you can and cannot extract value, give you a framework to learn from, and teach you how to price. That’s important because your product, customers, and competitors and going to change, and you have to be in the driver’s seat to continue to capture that value. Action Guide: Put the information Marcus shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links: Check out Marcos’s book, Street Pricing Learn more about Pricing I/O Connect with Marcos on LinkedIn Innovation Quote “Don’t compare your Chapter One to someone else’s Chapter Twenty.” – unknown Thanks! Thank you for taking the journey to product mastery and learning with me from the successes and failures of product innovators, managers, and developers. If you enjoyed the discussion, help out a fellow product manager by sharing it using the social media buttons you see below. Source

Apply to join the Product Mastery Now Community — Application deadline is soon. The journey to product mastery – for product managers I expect you, as a product person, love shaping the direction of a product, especially a product that provides you value. That is why I’m inviting you to be a founding member of a brand new product I’m launching—the Product Mastery Now Community. Too many of us have very little interaction with product professionals—in your own organization and at other companies. We need to be developing our professional network and learning with and from other product managers and leaders. If you neglect your learning, you are jeopardizing your ability to move toward product mastery and not getting better at developing products customers love. Instead, become a founding member of the Community. Not only will you influence its direction while getting value from the community; you’ll join for the lowest price that will ever be offered. Applications to join the Community will close soon. I’d like for you to get the benefits of being a founding member—learn about the community and apply at www.ProductMasteryNow.com/community. Today we are talking about the journey to product mastery. While everyone’s journey is different, I created a roadmap to cover the major stages. I first created the product mastery roadmap in 2013, and I updated it this year to reflect some changes in my experience and knowledge, as I’ve encountered hundreds if not thousands of product professionals since 2013. I expect you’ll find it helpful to talk through the four main stages of the roadmap so you can make better use of the resources you have to help you get to the next stage as well as to help those you can mentor and encourage at a previous stage. Download the product mastery roadmap at ProductMasteryNow.com/roadmap. . . 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 digital customer experience coupled with rapid physical product creation – insights for product managers Today we are talking about what Andrew Wolgemuth has learned creating a unique product business called Wove. Andrew and his co-founder and team have created a way for their customers to design engagement rings, experience their design in their home with a mock-up ring, tweak what they want, and then receive their one-of-a-kind custom ring. This is a digital business coupled with rapid physical product creation. Regardless of your industry, there are lessons you can learn from Andrew’s mistakes and successes. Before founding Wove, Andrew served as the Deputy Commander of a Special Operations unit in the United States Army’s 75th Ranger Regiment.  Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:16] What was the insight that led to Wove? Both my co-founder Brian and I experienced pain points when we were buying engagement rings. My childhood was centered around growing the family business, a small brick-and-mortar jewelry company. I worked with my parents to design an engagement ring for my now-wife, Sarah. I was stationed in Washington, and my parents were in Pennsylvania. They sent me numerous photos and videos of the ring, but when I saw it in person, I sent it back to my parents and asked them to rebuild it. I felt very bad doing this, but it was amazing to me that seeing photos and videos of a product doesn’t always translate into real life. We’re creating a user experience for engagement rings similar to Warby Parker, the home-try-on eyeglass company. [7:12] What challenges did you experience trying to implement your solution? When I talk with my team, we laugh because we feel like we’re building three different start-ups at the same time. We’re doing the in-house manufacturing focused on systems and logistics to create custom jewelry from scratch in a highly expedited timeline. We’re building a new digital product that’s the first of its kind for custom jewelry design online. And we’re doing the marketing and branding that’s so important for any ecommerce business. Sometimes we feel like we’ve bitten off more than we can chew, but it is coming together nicely, and we’re excited about the progress we’ve made. There are a few consumer pain points with buying an engagement ring, and a lot of them are tied closely to different cultural tailwinds. If you’re buying a ring online, you’re buying without certainty. You’ll put thousands of dollars down, and you don’t know what’s going to show up exactly. We send customers a replica ring first. We started the replica idea when I was in the Army, and I had many friends who were overseas in Afghanistan and wanted to buy an engagement ring but didn’t want to ship a $10,000 engagement ring to an Afghani address on some base so they could propose to the love of their life. Our replicas are shockingly realistic. They use imitation diamonds and non-precious metals. Our first replica rings were set to Army Rangers overseas who wanted to design a custom ring while deployed and be able to step off the plane back in the United States and drop to a knee. [11:13] How do you create the rings so quickly? The industry average for custom ring design is six to eight weeks. Advanced 3D-printing technology allows us to significantly cut down our timelines. Rings used to be hand-carved from a wax block then cast and polished. Hand-carving from wax takes a tremendous amount of time. We use new technology mixed with old-world craftsmanship. We design the engagement rings with jewelry designers. They send our clients a beautiful hand sketch of the design, and if the clients approve the sketch, it goes to our CAD designer who brings the sketch into a computer-aided design in about a day. We 3D print it overnight. Our 3D printer can print 300 rings in about three hours. We cast the rings in precious or non-precious metals, and our goldsmiths polish the rings and set them with real or fake diamonds, depending on if it’s real or the replica. We are generally building rings in seven days and getting them to clients in nine days. My co-founder and I love building systems. It was a lot of what we did in the military and in college, so we invested heavily in building a CRM and a digital product that can support building custom jewelry in a rapid timeline. The systems have allowed us to do it quickly and in a way that is scalable. [13:35] Tell us more about your customer experience. Clients come to our website and fill out a short design quiz, which allows us to match them with a designer. We do a 30-minute video design consultation and then send them a technical sketch of the ring. We design it in CAD and print and cast it. [16:45] What systems have you found critical to make this work? The big one is the digital product we’ve built—an online design portal for clients. One of the most complicated things about building custom jewelry is ensuring communication is clear and concise and that we keep track of the different details that go into a final ring. Clients can log in to their portal and converse directly with their designer via live chat,  share inspiration images to their vision board, and see exactly where their ring is in production. It’s a great interactive platform that we built from scratch. Nothing like it exists today in jewelry. The system allows us to track our clients’ preferences in style and jewelry. There’s a lot of application we can take from that down the road for launching our own jewelry lines and being able to make recommendations to our clients on what we think they’ll like in the future. It has a ton of applicability to helping them design their engagement ring and making sure it’s done exactly the way they envisioned. We built a complex CRM system that allows us to track every detail throughout the process and ensure we are up-to-date at every stage of production. It raises red flags when things are behind or we need to order more material. The CRM is tied directly into our digital product, and the heavy investment upfront in the CRM and digital platform is allowing us to do this efficiently. [19:28] How do you find and manage jewelry designers? All our designers are in-house as full-time employees. We draw a lot of parallels to Peloton, which takes world-class cycling instructors who are getting underpaid and brings them into Peloton where they can promote their own style and be paid more. Similarly, we’ve hired some of the top jewelry designers from major name-brand companies. We give them a better quality of life and a more interesting job and compensate them better. We give them a platform where they can create a name for themselves through Wove, working with individual clients, which is exactly what they want to do. We’ve attracted a lot of top talent across the industry to come to a small startup. [22:02] How did your product idea evolve? We’ve rebuilt our product three or four times. You have a hypothesis of what you think the answer is, and you build that and try to test it as quickly and cheaply as you can, but your assumptions are almost always going to be wrong. Our first version of the product allowed clients to submit a picture and get a replica. There are million different legal liabilities with that, and we would probably have every jewelry company in the US trying to sue us if that were our product today. We knew 90% of couples figure out what ring they want through Instagram, Facebook, or Pinterest. They have a picture and are trying to get a ring, so we initially focused on making that process as easy as possible. We found that to an extent our assumptions were true, but people want more of an experience. They don’t want to work with a pushy salesperson. A designer who is on their team is a much better process. A ring is probably the most expensive and sentimental purchase you will make in your life. You’ll wear it on your hand for the rest of your life, and it represents the love you share with your partner. We want this to be minimally transactional and an intentional experience. We’ve transitioned away from our initial model and made an interactive experience. [24:52] What’s your pricing strategy? We are less expensive than Tiffany or Cartier even though our quality is significantly better since those companies make jewelry on an assembly line. We have bench jewelers take each piece from start to finish. Every ring is made for an intentional couple in mind, which is special for our clients. Our prices are comparable to a brick-and-mortar jewelry store, on average $10,000-12,000. We did a lot of price sensitivity analysis when we first started Wove, and we discovered if we sold the exact same ring as Blue Nile but offered the design experience and home replica, clients were willing to pay $1,600 more to Wove for that experience than they would to Blue Nile for the transactional click-to-buy experience. We offer a flexible experience where we can meet couples at their pricepoint. [28:50] How do you use the data you collect through your CRM? What makes businesses like my family’s brick-and-mortar jewelry store special is the longevity of their relationships with clients. We know our clients and their preferences. If we got a new ring at my family’s business, I would know a customer who would love it and give their spouse a call and see if they’re interested. A lot of business is done that way. In an ecommerce business, where we’re selling our products in a very different way, we want to be the lifetime jeweler of our clients. We hope we only sell one engagement ring to a couple but continue to sell other jewelry to them. We were intentional going into our business to be able to learn about our clients and what their preferences are so we can serve them better in the future. We collect a ton of unique data points on their style and preferences. Action Guide: Put the information Andrew shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links: Learn more about Wove Follow Wove on Instagram Innovation Quote “Amateurs talk strategy. Professionals talk logistics.” – General Omar Bradley Thanks! Thank you for taking the journey to product mastery and learning with me from the successes and failures of product innovators, managers, and developers. If you enjoyed the discussion, help out a fellow product manager by sharing it using the social media buttons you see below. Source

What product managers need to know about the Product Development and Management Association The Product Development and Management Association (PDMA) has been curating the body of knowledge for product managers, leaders, and innovators and helping them improve since 1976—the longest-running product management professional group. Most of us haven’t known about product management for more than 10 or 20 years, yet PDMA has been improving the discipline of product management for nearly five decades.  Are you involved in a professional group for your career? If we were project managers, we would be involved with the Project Management Institute because they are the go-to association for project managers. Well, what about us product managers? PDMA is the professional group for us. What value does it provide? Is it staying up with current practice? Is it worth looking into? To help answer these questions, Susan Penta joins us. She is the current Vice Chair of PDMA and serves on PDMA’s group responsible for certification as well as the group that helps local PDMA chapters across the world. She is the co-founder and managing partner at MIDIOR, which has been providing professional services for 25 years to product organizations in a number of areas from product insights, product development and management, and technology platforms. It’s worth noting that PDMA is a volunteer-led organization and, like Susan, most of the people involved in its leadership have fulltime jobs in product roles yet find time to contribute to the professional association. On and off, I’ve been one of those contributors as well because I have found PDMA very helpful in my career development. This will no doubt be an interesting discussion. Attend the PDMA Inspire Innovation Conference in Orlando, FL, November 13-15, 2022: pdma.org/page/conference-central. Use code PMNPodcast10 for 10% off registration. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [7:17] How did you first discover PDMA? I started as a product manager in the eighties. When I founded MIDIOR in 1997, I was looking for training for the individuals we were hiring because all my product knowledge was based on experience, not formal training. I had some colleagues in New England who were involved with PDMA, and the PDMA New England chapter had disintegrated. We started talking, and I decided to use PDMA’s huge knowledge base as training and restart the New England chapter. I’ve stayed involved with PDMA for the basis of professional development that is provided through the knowledge base, formal certification, and anything in between. [10:36] What value has PDMA personally provided you? When I first got on the board in the early 2000s, my interest in PDMA was for both my firm and me personally, but it was more for the big vision. PDMA has always been special because we bring together practitioners, service providers, and academics. At that point the NPDP certification was just getting started, and I was part of that conversation, asking what that would look like and whether it would be applicable across industries. For me, a big industry is financial. At this time, financial services firms were recognizing they were technology companies, and the discipline of product development and management really didn’t exist. PDMA was instrumental for me in helping my clients get exposed to product management and its value. In PDMA we get to talk about product—the challenges and opportunities around product as a discipline. There weren’t other places to have those conversations. That part was a pleasure. I am all about the discipline of product management, nurturing the discipline, the importance of the discipline, and being supportive of all of the different roles across career journeys and industries. For me, that is why PDMA matters. [15:21] What does PDMA provide to product professionals? PDMA can be many things depending on where you are on your career journey. It can be a place you go to learn. It can be a community of individuals you connect with and learn from. You can do it in a fairly light and easy way by interacting with our digital content through our Knowledge Hub (K Hub), body of knowledge, or presentations. PDMA has chapters globally. It’s a nice way to engage with a community of peers and get exposed to companies and how they’re approaching product development and management. As you move through your career, what PDMA offers shifts. If you get interested in the more abstract parts of product development and management, you have access to our Journal of Product Innovation Management (JPIM) and individuals who teach at higher institutions and do research around product management. For most of us, PDMA is not a place you go but a place you belong as a product professional. PDMA is the place where anyone, regardless of how they intersect with the product discipline, can belong, converse, and advance the discipline. It is super helpful as you’re thinking about your future. Through PDMA you can explore many different career paths. [20:18] Tell us about the academic dimension of PDMA. If you are solely interested in research, there is probably a place at PDMA for you because we have an A-grade academic journal, JPIM. You can stay there if you want, but many of the academics who are involved in PDMA are as interested if not more interested in how the research gets translated into practice. PDMA does a nice job bringing academic conversations and real-time applications of research together. Academics do the research; service providers translate the research; and practitioners put the research into practice. We have a body of knowledge, an academic journal, a certification, tool books, and handbooks. Those resources go from academic endeavors to making things practical. The single most important thing that makes PDMA different from many organizations is we focus on closing the loop between research and practical applications. [26:41] Tell us about this year’s PDMA annual conference. November 13-15, 2022 Orlando, FL JPIM Research Forum Body of Knowledge workshops Innovation Café Outstanding Corporate Innovator Award panel Keynotes and speakers including Marianne Lewis, Jack Schaffer, Dan Olsen, Geoff Thatcher, and many others Action Guide: Put the information Susan shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links: Learn more about PDMA and register for the conference—use code PMNPodcast10 for 10% off Follow PDMA on LinkedIn Innovation Quote “Success can be found at the intersection of preparation and opportunity.” – Susan Penta, based on Seneca 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

Dr. Abbie Griffin discusses the importance of being a serial innovator in organizations. Topics include challenges faced by serial innovators in large companies, embracing neural diversity in innovation teams, and exploring frameworks for innovation. Join the Product Mastery Now community to learn more about becoming a serial innovator.