Product Mastery Now for Product Managers, Leaders, and Innovators

Skills to move from product manager to Chief Product Officer Today we are talking about the role of CPO, Chief Product Officer, and the skills and capabilities that help you move from product roles to a CPO role. Joining us is Rick Kelly, who is the CPO at Fuel Cycle. They’ve developed an insights platform to facilitate collaboration between market researchers, UX professionals, marketing managers, and product leaders. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [6:11] What technical skills have you found helpful for your CPO role? Product is the most fun role you can have because it sits in the nexus of pretty much everything. You have to understand finance, technology, and customers. On the technical side, for me it’s been learning by hook or by crook. Something comes up at a meeting and I don’t understand the newest database structure, and I have to dig deep and learn. My background was customer-facing, so I had to be self-taught and learn to communicate in a way developers would align with, understand, and respect. Speaking the language of development and being fluent and conversant are requirements for product leadership. It’s like learning another language—you have to be persistent and patient and spend a lot of time on YouTube listening to the latest talks on technology. [8:14] What do you mean by having the respect of the developers? You need to have the collaboration and respect of all kinds of departments. Whether it’s developers or your finance team, they need to know you’re willing to listen and be conversant in their field. My finance team and developers want to know I’m going to listen to them and trust them, and they’ll respect the decisions we make together. Product management is about efficient value delivery. Maintaining collaboration across teams requires that you as a product manager are conversant in other team members’ fields. Have sessions where you ask somebody to explain something is important. I don’t know everything, and I wouldn’t expect myself or any other product manager to be perfectly knowledgeable about all things technical. Asking honest questions is really important. There are junior developers who know a lot more than I do about the latest front-end framework, and and asking them to explain it to me engenders trust. [11:49] How did your customer interaction skills help you along your journey to CPO? The role of a product leader is value delivery. The goal of product management is to build things people will pay for. Understanding what people are willing to pay for is an absolute requirement for building a successful product. Understanding customer needs and knowing how to speak to them and elicit their needs to identify what’s truly valuable to them is an absolute requirement for anyone in a customer success or product management role. I map our platform’s value to customer needs and bridge the gap between the two. [13:10] What kinds of customer interactions were you having as an account manager? In many cases, customer success team members are compensated and evaluated based on their ability to review accounts, and that’s something product leaders should care a lot about. They have to be revenue-focused and find ways to deliver value. Product management is about making the right trade-offs to deliver valuable growth to the business. The biggest rate-limiter to growth is how well you understand customer needs. [17:00] What’s your perspective on emphasizing value to the customer or value to the organization? Solving customer problems is the most important thing. Monetization and the ability to grow follows that. Individual PMs need to be laser-focused on delivering customer value. As people grow in their careers, they have to be increasingly concerned about how the organization grows, monetization, and delivering value to shareholders. Having a strong alignment with the revenue side of the organization and with developers, finance teams, and marketing teams is critical for someone in a senior product role. They need a more holistic view on the business. One of our core values is “Team before self.” Senior leaders have to look at the value to the business, not just to their department or team. [18:49] What management skills have you found most helpful? I love to use the example from the book Ender’s Game. Ender becomes successful by learning that allowing his teams to be autonomous and make decisions independently is what ends up being successful in the long run. I prefer to give people high autonomy so they can independently make decisions that are in alignment with the organization’s goals and mission. If you articulate a clear strategy and roll it down to your team members and have clear alignment on your objectives, your team will be able to make good decisions that lead to positive outcomes without a manager becoming a bottleneck in the organization. [20:36] Have you struggled with micromanaging teams? Yes, I still struggle with it. There is a time for micromanaging, when there stakes are high and it’s important to be in the details. However, managers who are great on their own can end up becoming a bottleneck because they feel they have to control every single decision. Identifying areas where you need to be the one making the decision and where you can grant autonomy is important. That changes from organization to organization and from team to team. You have to know your organization and your ability to grant that autonomy. [22:49] What have you found most challenging about being a CPO? A lot of it is identifying ways to not be a bottleneck. That means you have to recruit the right resources, attract the right talent, and unbottleneck your organization. As an organization grows there’s more complexity that comes into it. Having strong alignment with other stakeholders and executives becomes more and more important as you grow because the decisions you make impact more people. That’s a lot to manage and learn, and you can’t do things on your own. You have to create alignment and understanding. Put simple messages on repeat in order to make the organization successful. [24:10] What do you like most about the role? It’s fun to have a big impact. There are a lot of companies and people I influence. I get to learn constantly. I see all sorts of new information. It’s very engaging and gets to be more fun than sitting still. Every few months I look back and see I’ve come a long way in the past six months. [25:09] How do you keep learning? There’s a natural curiosity a lot of successful product people have. That innate curiosity drives a willingness to learn and explore different ideas. I’m a regular reader of Stratechery, which is about the strategy of technology. I read a lot, listen to lots of audio books, and listen to things outside product management and technology to just keep learning. Action Guide: Put the information Rick shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links: Learn more about Fuel Cycle Connect with Rick on Twitter Innovation Quote “Strategy is a commodity. Execution is an art.” – Peter Drucker 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

Five must-have skills for product managers Today we are talking about the importance of product management and what makes a product manager great. We have the perfect person for this discussion, JJ Rorie. JJ has spent her professional career in product roles, both leading product in internal roles and advising and coaching companies. She teaches a graduate product management course for the engineering school at Johns Hopkins University and hosts the Product Voices podcast. She is the author of Immutable: 5 Truths of Great Product Managers. She is also the founder of Great Product Management, where she provides training, coaching, and advisory services for product managers, leaders, and teams. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [9:04] What makes great product managers? In your book Immutable, you address 5 truths of great product managers. Can you take us through each one? In the book, I focus on those skills of product managers that are immutable or timeless, regardless of your organization or industry. These 5 skills are not the only things you have to be good at in product management, but if you don’t have them, it’s going to be really hard to navigate the role of product manager. [12:27] Customer intelligence Customer intelligence encompasses the voice of the customer, continuous discovery, and all the mechanisms of understanding customers. It’s an overarching understanding and appreciation of your customers and who they are. Understand your customers on four levels: Characteristics Situations Motivations Unmet needs Great product managers move past levels 1 and 2 to levels 3 and 4. If you understand your customers at those levels, you know what’s truly happening to them and what pain points you could potentially help solve. [17:45] Relationship building Anybody who’s been in product management for a minute and half knows you have to have strong relationships with stakeholders, because we work with people all over the organization and even outside the organization. There’s no one-size-fits-all to relationship building, but the underlying tenet that is bedrock to professional relationships that work is confidence. The product manager has to instill confidence in each of their team members. Do your team members have confidence in you and do they have confidence in the product? Figure out the status of your relationships with the 10 people in your organization who you work with all the time and whose relationships are critical for the success of the product. Ask yourself, How confident are they in me? And how confident are they in the product? You can score them on each question and plot them on a quadrant. Some people are champions who believe in you and the product. Some people are detractors who don’t believe in either one. You can’t process your way through relationships, but you can be very intentional. You can understand where people’s relationships sit, and you can plan to nurture a champion and repair a detractor. [22:03] Effective communication Communication in product management is about connection and clarity. Connect with your audience through stories and empathy. Adapt to your audience. Product managers communicate all the time with different people, and you have to tailor your communication to each person. Understand when someone wants the details and when they want the big picture. Clarity means being concise and repeating yourself consistently. If you focus on connecting with your audience and improving yourself just a little bit in that area, you’re going to be a better communicator. [27:06] Good judgement Good judgement means recognizing we’re all susceptible to cognitive biases and trying to avoid them as much as possible. We’re all going to fall prey to confirmation bias, framing our questions in a way that taints the information we get back. Great product managers also become comfortable with ambiguity. In product management, there are no cut-and-dry absolutes. It’s not absolutely clear which direction is best. We work with incomplete data and have a few different ideas that could all be viable. We’re going to get it wrong quite often, but great product managers become comfortable with knowing they made the decision with the information they had at the time, moved forward, and learned. They put the mechanisms in place to quickly learn and pivot. They don’t fall prey to paralysis by analysis. [31:50] Prioritization Prioritization starts with prioritizing our time. Product managers are often asked to do things that aren’t really in the role. Great product managers are intentional. Understand where your time is spent. Categorize it, e.g., I’m spending X amount of time with customers and Y amount with customers, and I’m putting out fires 50% of the time. We first have to know how we’re spending our time at work, because of a lot of what organizations ask product managers to do should be done by someone else or at least deprioritized from our role. If something comes along that is ancillary to our top priority, we say no or figure out it could go to someone else. Once we’re doing the most impactful things with our time, we can prioritize features, functionality, and ideas. There are a lot of good prioritization models you can use. Prioritization comes down to asking, Is it going to add value to the customer? Which customer, how many customers? Are they going to pay for it? Is this where we want to go strategically? We can forget about prioritization, and I still find myself saying, “I didn’t do anything on my to-do list.” It’s not about being perfect. It’s just about making sure you’re focused on prioritization. Action Guide: Put the information JJ shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links: Check out GreatProductManagement.com Check out JJ’s book Immutable on Amazon or Bookshop Connect with JJ on LinkedIn or Twitter Innovation Quote “I either win or I learn.” – Nelson Mandela Thanks! Thank you for taking the journey to product mastery and learning with me from the successes and failures of product innovators, managers, and developers. If you enjoyed the discussion, help out a fellow product manager by sharing it using the social media buttons you see below. Source

The value of prototyping for product management You’ve heard that a picture is worth a thousand words, and perhaps the Lean version, a prototype is worth a thousand meetings. Prototypes help us convey our product ideas and gain critical feedback from customers. Being able to create prototypes quickly is an important capability for product teams. In this discussion we’re exploring a tool for prototyping digital products, which is Uizard. I enjoy exploring tools that can help us be more productive and understanding the problem they solve, and I expect you’ll find the discussion valuable too. Joining us is the Director of Customer Experience for Uizard, Tarek Slimani.  Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:27] What problem is Uizard solving? We bridge the gap for non-designers to easily ideate a product design. Typical design tools have very steep learning curves. Our platform is designed for ease-of-use and simplicity. We empower non-designers to ideate based on whatever they have in their minds. They can easily use our platform to construct an interactive prototype they can share with others. [6:13] What are some use cases for your product? Founders who have ideas but don’t really know how to create a prototype use Uizard. A product manager can design a flow test for customer experience and show it to the development team who can then perfect it. Marketers use it for landing pages. Students and teachers use it for courses. [7:47] Can you take us through a story of a customer who used Uizard in creating a product? One guy created an augmented reality mobile application that helps people explore how objects would look in their surroundings. His company’s core product was already built, but he and his team needed a tool they could use to quickly design and iterate the processes that go into a mobile app. They used another tool originally, but it had a very steep learning curve, and they didn’t get too far, so they switched to Uizard. They used our beta product, which uses AI to convert hand-drawn wire frames into editable mockups. They had a quick turnaround in ideating and editing their screens. [9:49] Tell us more about using Uizard to sketch ideas. When you’ve drawn wire frames on a piece of paper, it’s very difficult to edit something. You can take a picture on your phone and upload it to Uizard, which converts your wireframes into high-fidelity mockups that you can edit. The ideation process becomes much more rapid. You can share your mockups with your team and show the interaction in the platform, which is difficult to show on paper. [11:27] How do you add the flow logic of a user experience to your mockups? You can use our Interact options. If you want a button to go to a profile section, you drag a node from the button to the profile section. You can preview the buttons and screens live and have a look at the how the interaction works. [13:28] Are people using Uizard in design thinking workshops? Definitely. Design sprint facilitators and UI/UX designers use the platform. They embed Uizard into their websites to get feedback from users. [17:01] How else can Uizard be used? We’ve created predefined project templates and templates of components you can quickly put in your product. If you have an idea, Uizard is very easy to get into and start using to create a new project. You can start with a template or from scratch. [18:51] Have you encountered a creative use of Uizard you didn’t expect? A cybersecurity teacher used our platform for an interactive course. She created a prototype of a website with different options you could click on that would lead you through a journey to learn about cybersecurity. At the end, she could share the prototype live on stage in front of about 100 participants. I hadn’t thought of that use case and thought it was very cool. Action Guide: Put the information Tarek shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links: Learn more about Uizard Connect with Tarek on LinkedIn Innovation Quote “Innovations succeed when failure is seen as a learning step to success.” – unknown Thanks! Thank you for taking the journey to product mastery and learning with me from the successes and failures of product innovators, managers, and developers. If you enjoyed the discussion, help out a fellow product manager by sharing it using the social media buttons you see below. Source

Three levers to create products customers love I start episodes by saying, “I’m so glad to be part of your journey towards product mastery so you can better develop products customers love.” Today I want to dig into that journey in detail. As a listener of this podcast, your journey in some way involves developing and managing products. The titles vary, but you likely relate to product manager, product leader (such as a Product VP or CPO), or innovator. By diving into the specifics of the journey towards product mastery, you can identify where you are now on the journey and what to do next to further accelerate your career. I’ve talked with hundreds of product managers and leaders about their journey and found three recurring levers present in their journey as well as mine—levers that made a significant difference in our growth as product professionals. I’ll be sharing those levers in this episode (see below, starting at 11:03). For our 400th episode, I also have big news. I’m starting a community, the Product Mastery Now Community. This is something I’ve been asked about many times since starting the podcast in 2015. It is a way for people who already find value in this podcast to get even more from it and add additional fuel to help accelerate your product career. Apply to Join the Product Mastery Now Community Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [1:06] Milestones that equipped me as a product professional I hope you’ll reflect on the key milestones of your journey as I share mine. Starting my career as an electrical engineer as employee #4 in a small systems engineering office, wearing many different hats, and solving problems. Where did you start your product work?Creating rapid prototypes for potential customers, learning to listen to customer, and finding ways to better understand their needs. When did you gain an appreciation for working with customers?Observing a potential customer by watching them work for a week, creating a prototype that solved their problems, and leading the development team to make the product. What experiences have you had that deepened customer discovery for you?Starting to read innovation and product literature, learning about product management, and studying innovation deeply while earning my PhD. When have you engaged in deep and structured learning?Finding the Product Development and Management Association, earning their professional certification, and sharing with others how to be better product developers and managers. What mentoring and coaching experiences have helped you as well as those you’re working with?Creating a system for product managers, teams, and others in organizations contributing to products to learn a shared foundation, collaborate better, build trust, and get everyone on the same page and working faster—the Rapid Product Mastery Experience. What have been your key milestones in your journey toward product mastery? [11:03] Three levers that make a significant difference in our growth as product professionals I’ve talked with hundreds of product managers and leaders about their journey. You know what they have in common?  Three recurring levers are present in their journey as well as mine — levers that made a significant difference in our growth as product professionals. They aren’t sequential steps in our journeys but levers that reappear during times of growth and acceleration of our careers. Frameworks and tools. Ethnography and other tools helped me to better understand customers and became important to me. Frameworks and tools help us make sense of things so we understand what is important for a situation and what we need to do.Structured learning. You accumulate frameworks and tools by studying and learning. Likely, we have done similar things for this. I read books, attended 1-to-6-day workshops and conferences, and took university courses. While this was all helpful, for my first 10 years in product work, it lacked structure and I didn’t always relate what I learned in one area to what I knew from another area. Later, I learned in a more structured manner, which helped me to quickly connect the many pieces of product work. For me, a crucial part of this was the body of knowledge that PDMA has curated since 1976—the structure they add to their product management body of knowledge revealed important ah-ha moments for me.Peer learning. I’m pretty liberal when I use this phrase as I mean for it to include coaching and mentorship. In a peer-learning community earlier in my career, I learned from Product VPs who had much more experience than me, from other product managers who had more years in their career, as well as when I helped others with problems I had knowledge about. The power of a peer-learning community is the interaction with people at similar levels of knowledge and experience as wells as those with more or less knowledge and experience. The community helps you find practical answers to current problems, along with what was tried and didn’t work, more quickly than structured learning can itself. Further, I and others have found a community of diverse industry and domain experiences to be more helpful than one of a specific industry. [18:44] The Product Mastery Now Community The community is designed to directly and time-efficiently address the three levers that accelerate product management and leaders careers, providing (1) frameworks and tools, (2) structured learning, and (3) peer-learning interactions. Community members will receive: Training in the IDEA Framework, which stands for Ideation, Develop, Evolve, and Accelerate.Live interaction with podcasts guests after the live weekly podcast episode.Peer-learning through online discussion forums.Monthly live session for interacting with peers.Annual learning report of your training and learning experiences in a format you can share with your manager to show how you are improving your knowledge and experience. The community is designed to be a helpful resource and fun place to interact with other product managers and leaders, not an overwhelming experience that floods you with information. My goal is to focus on what matters and eliminate distracting and time consuming noise you don’t need. The community will be opening soon and I’m inviting you to be part of the Founder’s Launch. As one of the first people in the community, you can help shape it to be valuable for you and others. Further, members who join during the Founder’s launch receive the lowest price that will ever be offered. Now is the time to join during the Founders launch. I expect you’ll find the community is a great value. However, you don’t automatically get in. There is an application process, which I’m using to help create a more cohesive community.  After the Founder’s launch occurs, the community will be closed to new members for at least 6 months, and the price will be higher when it opens again. If you’re interested, apply now and let’s make a great community together. Apply to Join the Product Mastery Now Community Innovation Quote “Alone we can do so little. Together we can do so much.” – Helen Keller 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 for product managers from a Scrum Master Scrum is a frequently used approach for software projects and many other types of projects that would benefit from agility, including physical products. While Scrum is common, there are still many issues organizations encounter using Scrum. To understand how to overcome them, you would want to hear from a real master, and that is Fred Fowler, one of only 50 individuals in the United States who holds the prestigious Professional Scrum Master Level III certification. Fred has been developing software in Silicon Valley for more than 35 years. He tackles many of the issues he has encountered in his book Advanced Scrum Case Studies: Real-World Situations and How to Address Them. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [3:03] What attracted you to Scrum and becoming a Scrum practitioner? It’s hard to pinpoint the actual moment. I’ve been developing software forever, and for a long time I made my living working with people who didn’t understand technology very well but understood business. By understanding their needs, I was able to craft solutions that fit their needs. Scrum is about identifying needs and organizing people to fill those needs in a way that can be measured. I can’t emphasize enough how important measurement is, because unless you’re measuring, you have no idea whether things are getting better or worse. One of the most powerful aspects of the Scrum framework is its emphasis on measuring things—in product development, measuring the value of the product. In the world of software, many software practitioners don’t focus on measuring the value of their products. They measure the effort users put in but not the value users get out. It’s very important to measure the right stuff. [6:18] What metrics should product teams measure? Measuring the productivity of individual developers is impossible and a waste of time. Almost all the metrics I’ve heard about are just measurements of effort. There’s no point in measuring effort because you’re not finding out whether that effort is producing value. The only thing that makes sense to measure is the value of the product. A product owner or product manager is the person who is the investor in the world of Scrum. The product backlog is a list of needs to be filled. It’s the product owner’s responsibility to figure out which needs are valuable to work on now. There’s a negotiation between the product owner and the developers to reach an agreement about what is going to be produced by the end of a fixed period of time called a sprint. The developers figure out whether the product is possible and the product owner figures out whether it’s valuable. The product owner invests the time of the team to develop valuable results. In software, people get focused on technology and measure effort because it’s easy, but you need to figure out whether you’re developing something that is worth more than the cost you’re putting into it. [9:38] How do you measure value? The product owner needs to use the tools of product management to put a gauge on the value. The customer needs to give feedback. In the Scrum framework, during the sprint review, you look at the state of the product at the end of the sprint and have people who want to buy it in the room reacting. They give guidance to the product owner, who builds the feedback into the Scrum cycle. Ideally, have the customers heavily involved. If you have a single customer, that’s simple. If you have a mass market, you need focus groups or test markets. [11:52] How are customers used to provide feedback and what are some of the decision criteria for how they’re part of the project? There’s only one way to measure the product’s value: Sell it. Measure value by having people put their money where their mouth is. In the world of Lean, you deliver value in bit-sized pieces—minimum viable products. Get something into customers’ hands as soon as possible and find out what they think about its value by asking them to pay for it. There are four ways to increase value: Increase sales and revenue. It’s easy to calculate the value. If you sell 1 million copies of a smartphone game for $1.99 each, the value is $1.99 million. If it cost you half a million to make, that’s a great investment. If it cost you $3 million to make, that’s not a great investment. Decrease cost. If you make a million widgets a year and can save 50¢ on each one by improving it, the value is $500,000. Decrease risk. This is more complicated to measure. When I was a CIO, we had our headquarters at the end of a long fiber optic cable from a major city. About once a year, someone with a backhoe dug up the cable and cut us off for a day. We made $1 million per day, so that was a loss of $1 million per year. For $50,000, I moved the computers to a safe location and saved $1 million per year. Improve opportunity. If you’re in a competitive bidding situation and on average win one out of five bids, you could make a change to win two out of five bids. You can calculate the value if you know the value of the bids to guide you in how much to spend. Don’t spend $1 million to save $100,000. Do spend $100,000 to save $1 million. [16:59] Have you seen issues with a product owner not properly representing the customer or having the customer involved too much? How do you make sure the customer is properly involved in the process? The Scrum framework is about allocating responsibility for making decisions to people who are capable of making those decisions and following through. The product owner needs to be a business person who understands what the customer thinks is valuable and can make rational decisions about how to address the customer’s idea of value. The developers need to be people who are capable of producing that value. In Scrum, we talk about cross-functionality and self-organizational principles. A team is cross-functional if it has the capability to produce the product without getting any outside help. That’s very important in Scrum. If a team cannot do everything to create the value the product owner identifies, it has an excuse for not producing. The people who get authority are the ones capable of carrying it out, and if they can’t because they don’t have the right people or skills, they shouldn’t be making decisions. Just as important is self-management. Teams have to make their own decisions about how to get the product created. People don’t want to do that. Developers say, just tell me what to do and I’ll do my best.  They’re basically saying, I’ll try, but I don’t guarantee anything, and if it’s wrong it’s your fault. Teams have to make their own decisions so they can’t point fingers at anybody else. [20:46] Where does the product manager role fit in? The word manager is dangerous in a Scrum context because a manager is usually somebody who’s held accountable for results. In Scrum, the development team needs to be accountable for producing results. Developers love to have managers because they can avoid responsibility. Being a product manager in that context is a difficult, thankless job. The product manager has a toolbox to figure out what the market wants. The product owner uses those tools and poses challenges for the development team. The product owner doesn’t tell them what to do, just what would be valuable. At the sprint planning meeting, the product owner and developers have a negotiation. The product owner has a list of items with the most valuable at the the top. The product owner says, “I want everything done.” The developers say, “That’s crazy. We can’t do it all.” And they go back and forth until they reach an agreement on what the developers can do and shake hands. The developers have agreed with no one holding a gun to their head that they will deliver those items, and the product owner has reasonable, valid expectations that at the end of a sprint, the product owner will see the product with those items added. The developers have to take responsibility because they said they would get it done. These cross-functional teams are highly accountable. The product owner’s role is to identify the value that can be produced and be accountable for it. The product owner is an investor. You measure an investor’s success by looking at the return on investment. You measure the product owner’s success by looking at the value of the product compared to the cost of developing it. [25:07] How do roadmaps work with Scrum in product management? I’ve dealt with many roadmap issues because roadmaps tend to be made by C-level people and committees making a calendar for the whole year about what they want when. The problem is none of them is actually doing the work. An old joke says nothing is impossible if you don’t have to do it yourself. When a manager says, “I don’t care how you do it. Get it done,” it leads to disaster because people under pressure will make it look like they got it done, but actually they will not have gotten it done. They’ll take shortcuts and kludges to make it appear they met the deadline. Action Guide: Put the information Fred shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links: Check out Advanced Scrum Case Studies on Amazon Visit SiliconValleyScrum.com Connect with Fred on Linkedin Innovation Quote “I will teach your people to say ‘No.’  If they can’t say ‘No,’ then when they say ‘Yes’ it has no meaning.” – Fred Fowler  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 understand their customers better than anyone else If you have listened to me before, there is a good chance you’ve heard me say we need to fall in love with the customer’s problem, not our solution. Getting enamored with our solution can distract us from the customer experience. Instead, the customer experience is a component of what creates value for customers. For example, have you ever been asked to enter your address more than once during an onboarding experience? What about at your doctor or dentist? For me, the answer is yes to all three. It’s those simple things that add friction to the customer experience and if we want to make products customers love, we need to improve the experience for customers. To help us explore customer experience, joining us is Natashya Narkiewicz, currently VP of Product Management at Avetta and formerly senior director of product management for Newfold Digital, the company behind several popular webhosting brands, such as Bluehost, Network Solutions, HostGator, and Sitebuilder. She has held product roles for nearly 20 years and enjoys building products that have a clean customer experience. She is also a mentor in the business college at the University of North Florida, sharing her knowledge and experience each year with seniors as well as serving as a business mentor to female entrepreneurs in a 12-week program at the Jacksonville, Florida, Women’s Business Center. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [3:18] You made a move from being a senior product manager in the medical industry at a company creating surgical implants to being the senior director of product management for an IT services company specializing in web hosting. How did you make the move across industries? I was in the medical device space making surgical implants using the body to heal the body. It was a really exciting space when I first joined, but then the FDA increased regulations, and I realized that was going to stifle my creativity and ability to contribute to innovation. I started looking to switch industries. Strategic planning and connections assisted me in switching industries. Who I knew got me the interview and what I knew got me the job. The onus was on me to show product management is a transferable skill. It’s all about knowing who your end users are, what their goals and pain points are, and how you could effectively solve those pain points. Couple that with the business acumen of knowing sales, costs, and margins, and you can do product management in any industry. I knew I had to apply the framework I had used in understanding my previous users to users in this new industry. In my interview, I came up with lots of examples of how I could use that framework for scenarios that would apply to this company. Having a solid understanding of that framework landed the job. [8:21] Why is customer experience a key part of product management? If you don’t know your customer, you’re just guessing. I’m a naturally curious person. As a product manager, you have to be naturally curious, constantly asking why? It’s your responsibility to know your customer better than anyone else does. Get in their shoes, sometimes quite literally. The Jobs to be Done framework (listen to recent episode with Tony Ulwick) is a great way to think about your end users and what jobs they’re trying to get done. It helps you put yourself in their shoes. You need to know what is important to your users. Otherwise, you run the risk of building something that never gets used. [11:48] How do you keep your customer’s problem at the forefront? You need to humanize the customer. It’s easy to use the term “customer” in the abstract and lose sight of who your customer actually is. Often you may have different variances of your customer. It’s important to know who they are and humanize them. We develop personas with names and pictures so when we’re talking through solutions we can picture those people and ask how our solution applies to them and whether they care about the features we’re building. [15:16] Can you take us through a project with the objective of improving the customer experience? At Newfold Digital, we acquire a lot of companies that specialize in a product or service. Each of these companies comes with its own platform. We want to offer their services to our customer base. However, if our users have to move through different platforms, that’s a jarring experience. There are friction points, like if they have enter their address several times. We had the opportunity to unify all the platforms to provide a single customer experience and make the user feel as it were a single interface. First, we needed to understand who the users of these platforms are. We used behavioral analytics tools embedded in the platforms to see what areas users are going to. We talked to customer support and sales teams. We talked to customers. We built a customer community to talk with and understand what they’re trying to do. We needed to discover their objectives and pain points. After we understood a bit more about our users, we saw different groups of users on different platforms. We broke the pain points into three categories: internal problems like entering the address three times, external pain points where a competitor solves a job better than our platforms, and opportunities where the job the user wants done is not being solved by anyone. Understanding those pain points helped us build a list of things we want to solve for. [24:23] What is the next step to start taking action on those opportunities? It depends on whether you own the roadmap and can make decisions yourself or you’re part of a team where you have to do some selling. Either way, first prioritize your list. We had a list of things we could potentially do, but you never have enough resources, time, or people to do all of them. Even if you did, you couldn’t do all of them at the same time, so you have to prioritize which ones to work on first. There are a lot of prioritization frameworks, but it comes down to the highest impact and lowest risk. Next, execute. Again, this depends on whether you own the team or have to do some selling. [26:19] How did you sell your product plan to others in your organization? It helps to tell a story. I told a story about a day in the life of a persona, Olivia, who used our product. I walked through how she would use our reimagined solution of a single platform. I created a PowerPoint with mockups and screenshots so people could visualize it. Most people have to see it to believe it. You also need to provide data. This doesn’t have to be a time-consuming or expensive exercise. We knew we were making some risky assumptions—that changing the layout would decrease the time it would take a user to get to a tool, would increase the likelihood they could complete a step, and would increase the likelihood they would take a purchasing action. We knew we wouldn’t get buy-in unless we could get some proof we could actually improve those numbers. We created two low-fidelity mockups—a prototype of our existing experience and a prototype of our reimagined experience. We came up with five different tasks a user would need to do in the platform. An external market testing site facilitated our tests. We tested with five people on each prototype and got results within 24 hours. We saw our reimagined solution showed improvement in time to get an action, time to complete an action, and likelihood of a purchasing action. I wove those data into my story and showed we had validated a risky assumption. The story captured others’ attention and got traction. I found an executive sponsor who championed the idea alongside me, and I went on a roadshow sharing the idea with anyone and everyone. Some of the best movements are grassroots. Go to your peers. Create a team of missionaries who are championing the idea to their parts of the organization. Couple that with an executive sponsor who is having the same conversations at a higher level, and you have a chance of giving your idea some legs. It takes tenacity to sell your product. You know your customer better than anyone else, and eventually you start to feel the emotions of your customer and become as invested in meeting their goals as they are. That’s the passion that drives the tenacity to say, “We have got to get this done, and I don’t care how long it takes.” Action Guide: Put the information Natashya shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links: Connect with Natashya on Linkedin Visit the Newfold Digital website Listen to episode 374 on storytelling Listen to special episode with Tony Ulwick on Jobs to be Done Innovation Quote “There are many wonderful things that will never be done if you do not do them.” – Charles D. Gill 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 product strategy and customer research for product managers Today we are looking at product management work through the eyes of a CEO, exploring several topics together. The CEO joining us is Matt Young, CEO of UserVoice, the first product feedback and research tool for software companies. UserVoice is the tool I see most frequently used for collecting customer feedback and prioritizing customer needs to help product managers create more valuable products. Matt started his professional career as a software developer, and throughout his career he has been pushing for better ways to build software products. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [3:41] As a CEO, what do you expect from your product VPs? I need product VPs to develop a product strategy and measure its effectiveness. They must formulate a product strategy that will help deliver on the company’s overall strategy. They need to have a way to demonstrate whether their hypotheses are meeting the mark. If the product strategy is intended to drive an increased NPS, how are they going to tie their activity to that result? [6:48] How do you communicate strategy to your organization? We do it often in actionable ways. When we get together as an executive team to update our strategy every six months, we role play every department and title to make sure those people know how to support the strategy and be confident what they’re doing contributes. We make sure the strategy is simple and understandable to everyone. On the executive team, it’s easy to throw around acronyms your industry uses, but someone who just came out of school with a design degree may not know all those things, and a brief explanation isn’t going to make them an expert. Every two weeks, we do a company all-hands and make sure all our slides re-emphasize strategy and metrics we’re using to track it. We celebrate when an individual team meaningfully contributes to our goal. It not only re-emphasizes understanding of what the mission is but also gets people on board with how to achieve the end result. CEOs sometimes falsely feel we bear the entire burden of the company, but it’s really all the people who work at the company who are accomplishing everything, and I want them to feel they’re the ones who did it. There are a lot of people who view the product team as sitting in an ivory tower. They seem to be making decisions without a lot of information and are perceived as ignoring some of the feedback they’re getting and running around with their own agenda that isn’t well researched. The misalignment may come from a communications problems or a failure to see eye-to-eye on the difficulty of other people’s jobs. There are a lot of examples of misalignment between product teams and the rest of the organization. [11:00] How do you improve communication about strategy with product teams? Every time we propose a project for our product management team, we list a couple of bullets at the top explaining how this initiative will support the company’s strategy. Whoever’s leading the product team keeps re-emphasizing those points to the product team. People pay attention to their immediate managers. When all the conversations in the organization are oriented around the same goals and using the same language, it starts to stick. Strategy has to be ever-present in people’s day to day. [12:36] As a CEO, how do you interact with the product functions in the organization? It’s challenging for me and for most CEOs to hand off control and trust the people leading engineering and product. Every Monday the heads of each department produce a report I ask them to spend no more than 20 minutes on. If they’re spending a lot of time assembling that information, they might be too disconnected from the people doing the work. Producing a terse summary is a good opportunity for them to reflect on what they have a good handle on and what they should dig into more. I sit in on some brainstorming discussions, and I try to be as much of a peer in the organization as possible. If you have good interconnectedness from team to team, I don’t need to be the one making connections. We dissuade people from communicating through their managers and going up and down the tree until the right people get connected. We’ve shifted to an all-remote workforce, and it’s much more efficient to go on Slack or Zoom with the person whom you need information from. We have a brief product and marketing meeting and product and success meeting every week where everyone can talk about what they’re learning and the struggles they’re having. More than any report or oversight structure, these meetings create the self-healing network that creates the greatest value in our organization. In product management, we talk about adding value to a customer, and that’s not precise enough for everyone. There are a lot of ways to add value to the customer. We need to be a little more specific about what value we’re going to add and what problem we’re going to solve. Research is a huge area of focus for us. Product teams are known for doing research, but every salesperson and customer success person is doing research. We try to make sure all the research is shared freely among people because the way a customer speaks to a salesperson is much more honest than the way they speak to a product person who is presenting something they’re emotionally invested in. [17:31] How are you bringing customer information back and aggregating it in way that is useful for everyone? We user our own tool at UserVoice. It not only collects feedback from end users; more than 50% of the feedback UserVoice collects is from internal team members. If a sales rep hears a feature request from a customer, we grab that right away so the product team knows about it. At UserVoice, we sell to product managers, so our sales team needs to be more astute than a lot of people about product management. We bring our sales team along for the ride to learn about product management and how we ask questions. As a byproduct, our sales team is asking questions when a potential customer brings up a feature. That’s free customer research that lands on our plates. It’s not uncommon for one of our account execs to be doing a demo or call and ask a product manager to join the call when they hear a feature request. We get immediate feedback about what the sales rep is hearing, and the sales rep gets to witness how we might ask for further information. The potential customer comes away feeling like the company listens to what their customers say. Engineers can pop on support calls to help with technical problems. It helps them understand the downstream implication of their work. Some of the strategic thinking in product should come from anyone in any role based on their customer experiences. [22:15] How are product roadmaps constructed at UserVoice? A roadmap is a terse summary of the current manifestation of the product strategy that will support our business goals. Every eight weeks we start with a blank sheet of paper. That doesn’t mean old ideas can’t be rehashed, but we want to truly embrace the goal of Agile, which is to do the thing that is most valuable at any given time. That means not anchoring yourself to what you think you should have done last time. It might still be the most valuable thing to do, but it’s surprising how often we don’t end up doing the thing we thought we were going to do next because the research doesn’t justify it as the most valuable thing for our customers and business goals. We brainstorm ideas focused on problems not solutions. We involve the sales, success, and support teams as much as possible. The roadmap we produce is a list of things we decide to bet on from a list of things we researched. This is an eight-week process running coincidentally with a development cycle. Eight weeks is a healthy amount of time to do some lightweight work on a lot of things and some deep work on a few things and come to the conclusion that everyone working on the product feels good about it. If we were wrong we learn from it and try to take that information to the next cycle. [25:27] Do you execute in shorter sprints within your eight-week process? We create pitches, not tasks. A pitch is a problem and a solution in a “fat marker sketch.” Imagine drawing your solution with a really big Sharpie—that’s the level of detail. You talk primarily about the outcomes and what the end user should be able to accomplish. You decide whether you’re willing to spend two weeks or six weeks on it. There are no four- or five-week options, because it’s easy for us to distinguish between a two-week piece of work and a six-week piece of work. Within the eight weeks, there are six weeks of work and two weeks of cool down where the engineers get to learn new technology, fix bugs, and rearchitect things. We don’t divide our engineering and product teams. They’re reporting in the same structure. Their task is to deliver on those pitches. I don’t care what order they’re in or if the teams are reshuffling themselves. They know what their goals are, and they figure out how to best organize themselves to get them done. Self-organizing teams are in a better environment to find a sustainable way to keep working. Action Guide: Put the information Matt shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful link: Learn more about UserVoice Innovation Quote “If a machine is expected to be infallible, it cannot also be intelligent.” – Alan Turing  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

Misconceptions about Jobs to be Done – for product managers Today we are talking about a popular and often misunderstood product management tool—Jobs to be Done (JTBD). Joining us is the originator of Jobs to be Done, Tony Ulwick. I first discovered Tony through his book What Customers Want: Using Outcome-Driven Innovation to Create Breakthrough Products and Services. It was published while I was working on my PhD in Innovation and resonated with my research on why products fail. It is the innovation book I have most often gifted to others. He is also the author of the more recent book Jobs to be Done: Theory to Practice. Both are valuable books to add to your library if you don’t already have them. This discussion will examine misconceptions about JTBD and approaches for using it better.  Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [4:43] Can you help us understand the different perspectives on Jobs to be Done? Let’s start with the perspective popularized by Bob Moesta. One of the first products I worked on was the IBM PCjr, which headlined in The Wall Street Journal as a flop the day after we introduced it. I got interested in innovation because I wondered how they knew so quickly it was going to be a flop. Clearly they were using some criteria to judge the value of the product. If we could only know in advance what criteria people are using to judge our products, we could design the products to meet the criteria, and we would know we’re working on a winning product before it even goes into development. That’s the dream of every product manager. It became clear to me that people buy products to get a job done, and you study that job and make it the unit of analysis. Break down the job into steps in a process and understand how people measure success in each step. By understanding their needs in advance, we can figure out which needs are unmet and come up with solutions that address the unmet needs. Different people have applied the Jobs to be Done theory in different ways. I’m coming at it from the angle of figuring out how we create products people want—product innovation. JTBD is also useful in helping make people want products—demand generation, which is the perspective Bob Moesta takes. You can ask why people are hiring a Snickers bar or a Milky Way bar, from Bob’s example, and then you can tell other people who are also trying to get that job done to buy your product. JTBD serves a purpose for innovation and marketing. Using JTBD for demand generation doesn’t make the job the unit of analysis. Instead, you’re studying the buyer’s journey to buy the product, which is useful in coming up with better marketing and sales strategy. The JTBD approach works for both innovation and demand generation, but don’t assume people want the product you have. You can’t make people want products. If the product is not getting the job done, it’s not going to last very long. [11:09] Alan Klement wrote, “A Job to be Done is the process a consumer goes through whenever she aims to change her existing life-situation into a preferred one, but cannot because there are constraints that stop her.” What do you think about that definition? That definition comes at Jobs to be Done from the demand-generation angle. It’s talking about understanding the progress the customer is trying to make and the journey of making that progress. But it misses out on making the customer’s job to be done the unit of analysis. [12:25] Theodore Levitt said, “People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole!” How is this statement related to Jobs to be Done? I view it as the origin of the line of theory that has led to Jobs to be Done. Because of that quote, it finally clicked in my head that people have measurable outcomes they’re trying to achieve. It gives you the option to see the world through two different lenses. You can see the world through the lens of the drill maker and go talk to customers about how to make better drills, because you think you’re in the drill market and all your competitors are drill makers. Or you can look at the market through the lens of the home builder and realize there are people trying to create a quarter inch hole and they use many different products to do it, so there are different types of competitors. You realize you’re in a different market, and you’re able to compete much more effectively. [13:55] Tell us about Clayton Christensen’s milkshake story. The story starts with a milkshake. Clay talks about people buying products to get a job done, but the milkshake story doesn’t make the job the unit of analysis. People are buying milkshakes early in the morning. If we’re using Jobs to be Done for product innovation, we would ask, What job are they trying to get done as they commute to work? They’re trying to get breakfast on the go. We would study the job of breakfast on the go, break it into parts, figure out where people are underserved, and come up with a solution that would get the job done better. The milkshake story assumes a product upfront. The goal is to sell more milkshakes. Clay is talking about Jobs to be Done using a demand generation example as opposed to a product innovation example. You should be studying the problem. You shouldn’t be studying milkshakes—the milkshake is a solution. They’re studying milkshakes because their goal isn’t to create the best product people can consume on the go. Their goal is to sell more milkshakes. Instead, from a product innovation perspective, study the actual job of getting breakfast on the go and create a solution that gets it done better, which probably isn’t a milkshake. JTBD is useful for marketing, but that doesn’t help you create a better product. Understanding the underlying job is critical to your success in the future as a product manager. [20:11] Could you take us through an example of applying Jobs to be Done to a problem? The company Ontrack was going into the electronic evidence discovery business. They helped companies that had to get data for lawsuits. They had an inherent advantage in the space because they had technology that was really good at extracting information off hard drives, even damaged ones. However, they attempted to get into the business twice and failed twice. Ben Allen, their CEO, called me and asked for help figuring it out. We quickly discovered Ontrack had a misconception about what its market was. Through the Jobs to be Done lens, a market is defined as a group of people trying to get a job done. Ontrack thought their market was the IT people whom they had worked with for years, so they worked with them to create a tool to extract data off hard drives. It turns out the real customer was the legal teams in those organizations. They weren’t trying to get data off hard drives. They were trying to find data that would support or refute a case—that was their job to be done. Once Ontrack realized that, they added search capability to their data extraction technology, so the legal teams could search through the data to find what they need. This propelled Ontrack to success. The market was highly underserved and in need of automation, and Ontrack covered 60 of the 100 outcomes we discovered. We did qualitative research to capture statements about the desired outcomes, then did quantitative research to figure out which were most important and least satisfied. Ontrack’s innovation strategy was to focus on the list of outcomes in priority order year after year to get the job done better and better. Their initial product addressed about 25 outcomes, and over the next five or six years, they went down the list and addressed the next five or ten. This made it impossible for competitors to catch up, because they were on the most efficient path to growth. [25:59] How did you discover those outcomes? We went to the legal teams and confirmed what the job they’re trying to get done is. We learned they’re trying to find information that would support or refute the case. Then we sat with half a dozen members of the legal team and went through their process. We asked them to break that job into steps, creating a job map. Then we got into the specific outcomes they’re trying to achieve—their needs, the metrics they’re using to measure success when getting a job done. In every market, there are usually 50-150 different metrics people use to measure success. Take time to learn all those outcomes, not just two or three. A lot of teams address unmet needs one at a time and make incremental improvements, but there might be 60 unmet needs, and if you know all of them you could satisfy 20 at once and have a breakthrough product innovation. Next we quantified those needs. We surveyed 270 members of legal teams, and they told us which needs were important and not well satisfied with current solutions, which led us to figure out where the big opportunities were. That pointed us to the 60 unmet needs that became the target for their value creation effort. [28:23] How do you quantify the importance and satisfaction of customer needs? We never use pairwise comparison or any method that asks people to make choices among their needs. People don’t say they want one need satisfied over another one. Instead, we want to know how many unmet needs there are and how unmet they are. The trade offs are in the solution space. On our survey, we listed the 100+ outcomes. They’re broken into sections by job step and laid out side-by-side. We ask customers to tell us the importance of each outcome and the level of satisfaction from current solutions. The bigger the difference between importance and satisfaction, the more unmet the need is. Then we highlighted the top 60 unmet needs to focus on to create value. [30:38] There has been a criticism about your work—that you make Jobs to be Done overly complicated because you lead a consulting company and want to do the work yourself. What do you think of that criticism? It’s not as if we’re taking something simple and making it more complex. Innovation is inherently complex. We’ve worked for decades on trying to make it more simple. We’ve created frameworks to simplify it and answer questions like, How do you define a need? How do you define a job statement? How do you create a job map? How do you build a survey? If you know your customer’s needs, which ones are unmet, and whether there are segments of people with different unmet needs, you can make a whole variety of decisions downstream. Ninety percent of product teams have no agreement on what a customer need even is. Everyone says they’re trying to satisfy customer needs, but if a team can’t even agree on what a need is, how can they agree on what their customer’s needs are, which ones are unmet, and what the solution is? They can’t. This is why innovation is extremely difficult and complex. Also, it’s not as if customers have two or three needs. They use 50-150 metrics to measure success. It is complex. I think we’ve done a pretty good job laying out the frameworks, rules, and discipline that’s needed to get to successful innovation. The process is just complex, and if it weren’t there would be a lot more successful innovators out there. Action Guide: Put the information Tony shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links: Learn more about Jobs to be Done on Tony’s Medium website Get a free e-book or audio book of Tony’s Jobs to be Done book Sign up for the The JTBD + ODI Fundamentals Certification Course with Tony—starts September 5th. Use promo code Chad for a 10% discount. Innovation Quote “The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well that the product or service sells itself.” – Peter Drucker Thanks! Thank you for taking the journey to product mastery and learning with me from the successes and failures of product innovators, managers, and developers. If you enjoyed the discussion, help out a fellow product manager by sharing it using the social media buttons you see below. Source

Lessons learned on a journey from schoolteacher to Head of Product Most of the people that listen to this podcast have been in product management for several years. Many of them are in leadership roles, such as Product VPs, CPOs, and Heads of Innovation. But many others listen as well. Some are new in their product management careers, and others listen to this podcast because they are considering a career in product. All of us have different paths to our roles, and I love hearing about people’s paths and what attracted them to product management, especially when the path is uncommon. In this episode, we are going to hear about Bella Renney’s path and what she learned along the way that helped her become Head of Product at Tray.io, her current role. Bella is a former secondary schoolteacher with a bachelor’s degree in geography.  After teaching she moved to product roles. Now at Tray.io, she believes embedded integrations may be the relief product teams sorely need. She is leading product and engineering teams to develop a platform for embedded integrations that quickly connect various software applications. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [3:02] When did your interest in product work begin? I was always interested in people, how they use tools, and the problems being solved by businesses. When I was in education, I thought about how we could educate better. How can we empower students, teachers, and parents? It was scary how little we were utilizing great technology to solve challenges in education. I wondered what we could do to use technology better to share resources among teachers and bring students into the 21st century with skills like innovative thinking. That’s where my interest in product and technology and solving problems came from. I wanted to use technology to solve the problems I saw every day in teaching, but I couldn’t do that in the role I was in as a secondary school teacher. I moved away from the classroom into product technology. I want to empower others to make things better. Rather than just using technology for technology’s sake, how could the right tools in the hands of the right people empower them? The right software in the hands of someone in an organization can add transformative change to their own role, their team, and their business. [7:53] How did your desire to make things better turn into your first product role? As lots of product people do, I thought I could do it all myself. I wanted to start my own business. I tried a few different avenues, and it lasted for a bit of time and taught me grit and resilience. That was exciting, but I decided I wanted a bit more skin in the game. That led me to take a job as a contractor with a few folks I knew who were launching a product software company called TableCrowd. They were pivoting from being a services company to a platform for running events. We had a bunch of tools people used to run events, and we wanted those tools to talk to each other to provide a seamless experience for people running and attending the events. I did market and competitor research and figured out the basic requirements for the product. I moved to financial software company Bloomberg for a while, helping them with product for philanthropic endeavors. Then I landed firmly in the European car tech industry at a car buying marketplace where I stayed for three years. After that I went to Tray.io, where I am now. [12:38] What skills help you be successful in product work in a variety of domains? It’s important to have a blend of frameworks in your toolkit. Ask good questions of the folks you’re working with, who are more expert than you in their domain. Ask curious, open questions to get insightful qualitative data from customers, potential customers, and stakeholders. From teaching 11-18-year-olds, I had developed the muscle of how to talk to people, how to get things out of them they don’t want to say. That coaching habit helped me across the board to move swiftly, hit the ground running, and know everything I needed to add value to whatever group I was working with. You need the ability to influence others. Leadership characteristics will serve you incredibly well. First, ask the right questions of the right people and build relationships. Second, know what to do with that information to move everybody forward. Know when to make decisions based on collective agreement and when to have a more dictatorial stance. Ask yourself, do I have those leadership skills? If not, what do I need to do to grow them? Be confident you can use these skills in other places, in other domains or industries. Moving to a new domain, I don’t bring the same assumptions everyone else in the industry has, which is really valuable as we’re trying to create new value for customers. However, it’s not easy to move to a new industry. It’s scary. I love the knowledge I have about the industry I’m in now, and I think it’s really valuable. The idea of taking all that accumulated knowledge about our customers and putting it aside to go somewhere new where I have nothing to bring to the table is daunting. I have the energy to always want to learn more. Be hungry to learn what you don’t know. Be curious and ask good questions. [20:37] Do you consider yourself more of a product person or an innovation person? I would say I’m more of a product person, but there’s definitely overlap between product and innovation. I like to harness the people and processes in an organization to bring product thinking into innovation. I apply a product lens to a novel idea to determine how it adds huge value for our customers. It’s important to have a nice blend of both product and innovation, because sometimes you can get caught up in the product headspace thinking about the value and opportunity cost of the product and lose sight of why it’s exciting and where it could go in the future. Allow yourself to dream, hope, and think. [23:18] What experiences prepared you to lead product at Tray.io? One thing that has enabled me to lead product where I am is a lot of enthusiasm for our product and how cool it is. I’m infectiously excited about our product, what we do, and how much better we do it than others in the market. Through infecting other people with energy, motivation, and excitement, I allow people to see the bigger picture of what they’re doing. It puts me in a leadership role because I’m painting that vision of where we might go in the future in a way that allows people to get behind what we’re doing. There’s a balance as a leader, because hard things are hard. Always focusing on how great the product is can lead you to miss that you’re having really hard challenges. It’s a balance between creating excitement about the future and empowering teams to solve immediate problems. As a product leader, you have to find the people you can lean on when things are hard. Those people will help pull you through and make you feel like you’re part of a team as opposed to just on your own at the front. Build those relationships early so they’re in place when you need them. Action Guide: Put the information Bella shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful link: Learn more about Tray.io Innovation Quote “The definition of insanity is doing the same things again and again expecting different results.” – attributed to Albert Einstein  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 empower teams to create a winning product strategy We hear a lot about strategy and that product managers need to create a product strategy. In practice, what does that mean and how does a product strategy help you be more successful? Helping us explore that topic is Sean Kim. He is the President and Chief Product Officer at Kajabi, a web platform that helps creators and entrepreneurs turn their knowledge into income. Previously, Sean was head of product at TikTok, where he set the strategic direction and led product teams. Prior to TikTok, he was the global head of product at Amazon Prime.  You can see from his intersection of product and business leadership experiences that he is the perfect person to help us better understand creating product strategy. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:31] What is strategy? I always start with the customer problem. Once I’ve identified the biggest problem I can solve for them, I think about the potential solution to solve the problem and reduce friction. Then I think about how we can offer the solution. We create a step-by-step approach to validate the solution through a minimum viable product and then start building the customer experience. Strategy includes thinking about what your competitors are doing and the risks involved in your solution. Product strategy is 100% focused on the customer. [7:23] Is there a link between product strategy and organizational strategy? It’s critical to know what your North Star metric is—where you point all your product teams. Then look downstream to identify the core metrics that are helping you drive to the North Star metric. Then find the input actions that drive the core metrics. Align your teams around these actions. [10:57] What’s an example of creating a product strategy? When I was at Amazon, our North Star metric was paid Prime members. We needed to ensure our customers realized the value of membership. We focused on the Prime membership cancellation experience. We launched a new cancellation experience that helped customers realize the benefits they would lose if they cancelled. Even though Prime is a well-known brand, most customers didn’t realize there are over 30 benefits beyond two-day shipping and videos. After our successful tests, we had to scale globally. We enabled machine learning to test everything—the cancellation experience, copy, call to action, colors, etc. The machine learning tested all combinations of the content in the cancellation experience and determined the best one to show people globally. We had to debate whether we would offer discounts for the membership. That’s a slippery slope. We’re trying to empower PMs or marketers globally to make decisions. We established tenets for how to make decisions to help scale the business and improve the product globally. [17:27] What’s something that’s gone wrong for you related to product strategy? I tell my teams not everything is going to work, but you have to swing big. You have to take risks, and some will fail. Failure is just one step closer to success. It’s an amazing learning opportunity to know what’s not working. From there we can potentially build even better products. When I was at TikTok, I worked on the Learn tab. TikTok has two tabs on the homepage—Following and For You. We launched a third tab called Learn because a lot of people who had stopped using TikTok said the content was not useful. We set out to onboard more useful content and create a dedicated place where people could find it. We thought we could potentially launch other tabs that offer dedicated content. It seems like a simple enough concept, but it’s actually a ton of work across a lot of different teams. There was a lot we had to think through. Once we launched, we saw only a small percentage of people visited the Learn tab. Most people stayed on the For You feed. Users say they want specific categories, but their actions say otherwise. We saw the more time people spend outside the For You feed, the worse the core metrics are. Watching Learn content isn’t very fun. Users want a variety of content. Determining what should be classified as learning content was incredibly hard. The Learn tab wasn’t a successful product, but we learned a lot from that experience. Learning videos are much longer than entertaining videos on average, which means users watched fewer total videos on the platform, but the longer videos didn’t negatively impact certain metrics we care about. This opened the door to testing longer videos on TikTok, which now has 10-minute videos. We learned users do want useful content, so we continued to invest in educational content, but we included it in the For You feed. [23:50] What’s the value of empowering teams, and how have you drawn the best out of teams? Make sure you’re focused on the customer 100%. Understand what motivates them and figure out the big problems you can solve for them. Talk to customers on a regular basis. I talk to customers at least once or twice a week. You don’t need all the data to make a decision. Get what you can, make a decision, and move on. If it doesn’t work out, you’ll have more data to improve the next product. Stay curious. Keep learning. As a PM, think like a CEO. You have to be versatile and have a solid understanding of the different functions of the business. Contribute to all the conversations that are happening because all the different teams are essential to the success of your product and business. You have to take risks and be okay with making mistakes. Expect to fail. It’s going to be okay. Failures are one step closer to a better product. Give your team freedom to experiment and fail. Share the failures you’ve made. Action Guide: Put the information Sean shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links: Learn more about Kajabi Innovation Quote “Stay hungry. Stay foolish.” – shared by Steve Jobs 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