Product Mastery Now for Product Managers, Leaders, and Innovators

Ask the right questions to uncover your customers’ problems Today we are talking about one important skill that separates great product managers and innovators from the rest. It is the same skill that separates great leaders from the rest. It is also seen in great friends. What is that skill? I’m going to leave you in suspense for a moment and first introduce our guest. Tony Poon is the Chief Product Officer for R-Zero, a biosafety technology company creating products for disinfecting shared spaces. He has a long history in technology products that includes Texas instruments, Logitech, AMD (where his customer was Apple), and many others. Tony is going to help us get better at this important skill for product managers, which is asking the right questions. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:42] You’ve said, “To find the right answers, you must first ask the right questions.” When did you start realizing the power of questions? I come from a computer engineering and hardware background, where the stakes are high because mistakes take a long time to fix. When I was an architect designing systems and working with product managers, I would ask for a list of features and come up with the best architecture I could, but there was a chance I was solving the incorrect use case. I realized we can unintentionally end up solutioning things we like based on assumptions of what the problems are rather than based on the actual customer pain points. Failures led me to understand that if I don’t really understand what the problems are, it’s really hard to come up with the right solutions. The best way to uncover the right answers is to ask the right questions. [4:36] What are the characteristics of the right questions? It’s about asking the right questions and asking them in the right sequence. Ask questions focused on the context of the problem rather than the symptoms. Often we’re presented with a list of attributes of a problem or the solutions someone is describing, and we have an urge to go into the solution right away because we assume we understand the problem. The person presenting the problem or you yourself may be so excited about trying to resolve the problem that you don’t get enough coverage on the different facets of the root causes of the problem. You’ll end up solving only a portion of the problem or missing the mark completely. Acknowledging the symptoms is really important, but redirect your team to focus their firepower on the root problem that’s causing the symptoms. Asking three why questions is a good place to start. [8:06] How do you think about framing a problem? First understand whom you’re solving the problem for.  Often, especially in enterprise, the person who’s describing a problem to you may not be the person experiencing it. I’ve often realized too late that I’m talking to a third person who may not truly understand the motivations and drivers of the person experiencing the problem. Don’t start until you have framed the person whom the problem impacts. Second, understand what outcome the customer is trying to achieve. Solving for people’s preferences often doesn’t yield the ultimate outcome. Explicitly uncover the outcome of the stakeholders and the success criteria to be able to say whether you can solve the problems efficiently. [11:51] What other insights do you have about the right questions? I sometimes catch myself asking leading questions with a solution in mind. There’s a time and place for that, but getting into the solution space too soon often leaves a lot on the table so you can’t fully uncover what the problems are. Resist the urge to jump to questioning around solutioning. Be cognizant of whether you’re asking questions based on facts or assumptions. Are you asking a question as a reaction to something a customer said, or because you have an assumption? Knowing the source of the question helps you uncover how much weight to put on the answers you get. Use your customer’s name more and use “I” less. This helps you fact-check whether the customer said something or you assumed they said it. Tools like journey mapping are helpful for writing down what’s being done and your goals. This helps you fact-check when you come up with a solution to see if there’s going to be an impact on the actual problem rather than on what you think customers need. [17:14] What are some wrong or less powerful questions? “What if” questions are potent but dangerous. Customers may react positively, but they may be reacting to your great idea rather than the fact that it connected to their outcomes. If I ask my son, “Would you like candy?” I know what the answer will be. It’s very different if I ask him, “What snack do you want?” You get extremely different perspectives. Product people sometimes tell the customer they’re using the product wrong. Far too often they apply logic to customer behavior. The customers know their problems best, and they will always use the most optimal way of solving it. Our job is to solve problems rather than telling customers the right way to use our tool. Customers have reasons for using products a certain way, and it’s not all driven by the most optimal logic. [21:02] What’s an example of asking the right questions? When I was at an industrial drone company, one of our customers was a mining company. Mining safety engineers have to walk around the mine and make sure things are compliant. A customer told us their compliance checks were manual and time consuming, and they wanted us to make them more efficient. Our engineers jumped into action to build a drone that could fly autonomously and use machine learning so they wouldn’t need human beings. However, we realized we had no idea what was driving their workflow and making it inefficient. The root problem ended up being that regulations required people to physically walk the site in order for a certified professional to sign off. Without knowing that, we would have a build a solution they could not use. By taking a pause and asking questions, we were led down a different path to build a mobile app that provides high-precision GPS documentation offline. [24:36] What’s your perspective on the Steve Jobs quote, “Don’t listen to your customers. They don’t know what they want”? I don’t think that’s actually what he meant. What he was trying to say is listen to what the problems are regardless of who’s telling you what the symptoms are. Action Guide: Put the information Tony shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful link: Learn more about R-Zero Innovation Quote “A problem well-stated is a problem half-solved .” – John Dewey 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 case study with an electric vehicle gamechanger Today we are exploring technology-driven vs. market-driven innovation. I want to set up the topic for us a bit. There are times that a technology comes first and later a problem associated with a market need is found that the technology addresses. Examples include the glue that made 3M’s Post-it-Notes possible 7 years after the glue was invented, an electric actuator Caterpillar invented that went unused until they later created a digger that couldn’t use their standard hydraulics platform, or the magnetic research my daughter is doing as a physics student, studying spin wave properties, for applications that are yet to be discovered. However, I find market-driven innovation is more common—the wants and unmet needs of customers are first discovered and then solutions are considered. This is the innovation process seen in the Jobs-to-be-Done methodology and described in many books including The Innovator’s Method. To help us compare and contrast these approaches, Dr. John Cooley is with us. John has five technology degrees from MIT, starting with dual bachelors in electrical engineering (EE) and physics and including a PhD in EE. He founded Nanoramic in 2009 and now serves as the Chief of Products and Innovation. Nanoramic is a nanocarbon composites engineering company, currently working on electric vehicle batteries by reducing their costs while increasing their energy density (more energy in smaller and lighter batteries) and at the same time providing rapid charging. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [3:21] How do you view the value of pure research and market-driven research? At Nanoramic, we have developed a product development business model. Some of our products are market-driven and some are technology-driven. We recognize there always needs to be a market-driven aspect for a successful product. Even if we start with a cool technology, we link that development to the market. Our product development has a large surface area in contact with the outside world. We create ways for our product development teams to interact with customers and get feedback that they formalize into the product development process. We look for sensors to sense the market need. The most effective sensor is customer interaction with an existing product. In a conversation about an existing product, what does the customer say they would want instead? A lot of products come from market need, but we have developed products starting with technology. Our original energy storage technology was a technology-driven innovation. It was a highly efficient electrode technology for a niche energy storage device called a supercapacitor. We had a way of making electrodes with a uniform array of nanotubes, which had advantages for ion transport and overall efficiency. We connect innovations like this to clean tech. Another example is our business line Thermexit focused on polymer composites and products. Our key product line is a thermal interface for electronics systems. It helps dissipate heat from electronic components, which is crucial for performance because the efficiency with which you can remove heat is directly related to performance. This technology began while we were studying carbon nanotubes and other nanocarbons. Some of the composites we created had very interesting properties like high thermal connectivity. At an investor meeting at MIT, we talked about how we would use our technology for thermal interface materials, and everybody got excited. We eventually developed a product and found the market in high-performance consumer electronics. That’s an example of a product that started from a bunch of nerds in the lab working on something we thought was cool. Later we found the application as the technology developed, and we turned it into a product that is a successful business line today. On the other hand, our electric vehicle lithium ion battery is a market-driven product. We adapt our core innovations, driven by the requirements and needs in the market. It’s always a mix. Successful products can be market-driven or technology-driven. Be opportunistic but also disciplined. We do a feasibility analysis to create discipline in identifying product concepts and how they fit the market. If we start with a market, do we have technology that addresses that need? If we start with technology, is there a market that will buy the product? [10:32] How did you get on the path that led to creating the thermal pad? In our company we encourage engineers to experiment in the lab. Some engineers had already played around in the lab with polymer composites and had seen some neat properties. If you establish a mesh of carbon nanotubes or other nanomaterials with a high aspect ratio, you get a low percolation threshold, meaning you don’t need much material to establish the mesh. We also noticed that carbon nanotubes have hyper electrical connectivity, meaning their resistance decreases as temperature increases, the opposite of normal metallic conductors’ behavior. After noticing these properties, we had conversations with investors and customers and decided to make a business line that became Thermexit. We made a list of product concepts and identified the lowest hanging fruit based on market adoption cycle, customer interest, and alignment with our technology capabilities. Through this feasibility analysis, we ended up with our first product in that business line, the thermal interface. This product goes through a very fast one-year design cycle. It was a good choice for our first product because it’s easy to understand and it has a simple, small manufacturing footprint. [16:21] How did the team with both research and business expertise come together to create Nanoramic? I co-founded the company with another MIT grad student, and we were coming out of the 2008-2009 recession when a lot of stimulus funding went to clean energy applications and technology development. My co-founder and I took a business class called Clean Energy Venture, and we turned our final project into a business plan for a clean energy prize competition. We then turned it into a grant proposal for a major DOE grant award. We won $5.5 million to develop advanced carbon nanotube-based electrodes for supercapacitors and clean tech applications. We’re passionate about creating technology for clean tech applications. Our goal is specifically to commercialize technology in an application and industry that’s worthwhile. That goal comes out in our day-to-day conversations. My personality has put a thumbprint on the organization. I’ve always been fascinated by electronic systems—the ability to cobble together a collection of electronic parts into a system that does something you want it to and that other people will pay you for. I’m energized by the idea that you could connect a cool technology idea to a market-driven need and a paying customer, and I think that shows up in the organization. [22:01] How did you go from building supercapacitors to doing tech for batteries and electric vehicles? Our aspiration has always been to make a big impact on clean energy. In 2009, supercapacitor technology was very popular. Supercapacitors are nanoscopic capacitors with a high surface area and small separation between conductive plates, meaning they have high capacitance. Dielectric capacitors are high power and low energy, and chemical batteries are high energy and low power. Supercapacitors are in the middle. We figured out where our technology could fit in the market by matching the power and energy capabilities of each technology to the application. [26:57] How did the capabilities and IP you built up lead to working on electric vehicle batteries? In the first seven years of the company, we worked on a lot of innovations around energy storage devices because we had grants from the DOE and NASA and commercial contracts. All that taught us a lot about the fundamentals of energy storage devices. In 2016-17, the electric vehicle renaissance began, and we developed electrode technology for supercapacitors that eliminated the most limiting material, a nonconductive binder, providing benefits in cost, performance, and sustainability. We had exciting technology right at a time when the electric vehicle market was becoming very exciting. We were looking for an opportunity to finally get into clean tech, and we found it. [30:43] How did you decide to create technology that enhances the way batteries are created, rather than creating brand new batteries? One of our competitive advantages is the ability to create lithium ion battery technology with advantages in cost and performance that reuses existing manufacturing equipment and infrastructure. The ability to rapidly scale, commercialize, get the batteries into vehicles on the road, and have an impact on CO2 emissions as soon as possible sets us apart. There wasn’t a moment when we decided to adapt our technology to existing batteries. It was inherent in the way we work and think. We focus on practicality in processes and supply chain and on product commercialization, not owning high-volume manufacturing. We want to get the products commercialized as fast as possible, so we manufacture up to a point to prove it’s scalable then outsource manufacturing. We had the technology to eliminate the nonconductive binder, and we thought we could transfer it to lithium batteries. We realized we could reuse manufacturing equipment and license our tech to existing facilities, and everybody would want it because it simplifies the manufacturing process, reduces costs, and improves performance. Our innovation strategy was born out of the organizational strategy. Action Guide: Put the information John shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links: Learn more about Nanoramic Follow Nanoramic on LinkedIn Innovation Quote “The harder a decision you make, the more value you add.” – John Cooley  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 this product manager created a successful product for an underserved market Today we are taking a product journey, exploring how an insight about an underserved market turned into a valuable product and a rapidly growing company. I love hearing stories of a product’s journey and enjoy sharing one occasionally on this podcast because, regardless of you role in product management, leadership, or innovation, there are important lessons to be learned.  Joining us is Matt Danna, who graduated Magna Cum Laude from Rochester Institute of Technology, where he focused on web development and human computer interactions. His professional career has entirely involved product roles, most often as Product VP or Head of Product. During his experience he became aware of an opportunity to better serve small businesses that needed to frequently make and manage client appointments. He is now the co-founder and CEO of Boulevard, which provides a SaaS platform for spas and salons to increase sales, in part by increasing client bookings and decreasing no-shows. I’m eager to hear how Matt has made this happen. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:35] What early experiences caused you to be interested in creating products? I grew up building with Lego, K’NEX, and Lincoln Logs, doing finger painting, and exploring my creative and artistic side. Growing up I didn’t know if I wanted to go into computer science or graphic design. I decided on information technology because of the salary and kept graphic design as a hobby. Product has been a way to join the artistic and technical worlds. [4:42] How did your interest in design and user experience evolve? I noticed the most successful companies’ products feel delightful and magical. They surprise you with their elegance and how easy they are to use. I love creating those moments with technology, particularly straddling the worlds of software engineering and design. I’ve always been drawn to building technology for creative individuals, and that’s been the theme throughout my whole career. [8:40] Where did the idea to create a product for spas and salons come from? At my last company, I was the VP of Product and the co-founder of Boulevard, Sean, was the VP of Engineering. One day Sean’s hair was a complete disaster, and I told him he was looking way too much like an engineer and needed to get a haircut. He kept forgetting to call the salon during the day to make an appointment, and at night when he remembered they were closed. I had the same problem. We hypothesized that if salons were more convenient to call, they would make more money, and we didn’t understand why they were seemingly so far behind on technology. One weekend Sean and I walked into a bunch of different salons in LA and asked them how they handled appointments. We were surprised that 100% of the businesses were using technology that was capable of online booking, but none of them had it embedded in their website. They wanted people to call to make appointments. We learned these businesses are really low margin—a healthy salon or spa operates on a 5% profit margin. The front desk controls the profitability of the business based on how they schedule appointments. If you’re a new guest, they’ll add 15 minutes consultation time. If you’re returning, they want to know what service you got, who your stylist was, and exactly how long it took. If you no-showed in the past, they’ll put you at the end of the day so if you no-show again, they can cut the staff early. Most importantly, they’re double-booking so a professional can be with multiple clients at once, and they’re making sure there are no gaps between appointments on the schedule. The front desk staff is doing yield optimization on the fly, and no scheduling system had any business logic. It was a no-win situation for business owners. Either they had had to hire an army of front desk staff and have friction in the client experience, or they had to use online booking and be less profitable. We thought technology could solve this. We built our MVP, found a couple of customers at first, and built lots of functionality to figure out how to optimize the schedule in real time. We built a constraint solver that takes all the inputs and figures out the most ideal time for the appointment. When customers book an appointment, the calendar only shows the times that are best for the business. We learned that the start time of the appointment doesn’t matter much to customers, but it matters a great deal to the business. We knew if we could turn this opportunity into a win-win for the consumer and business owner, it would also be a win for our company. Automating scheduling allows stylists and salon owners to be more productive on the things that truly matter. We try to automate as much of the mundane as possible. We’ve evolved from just a scheduling app to an entire client experience platform—point of sale, reporting, inventory management, you name it. We’re following the vertical SaaS playbook of building a lot of functionality that goes very deep for a specific vertical. [20:15] How did you decide you had a big enough market that this problem was worth pursuing? I don’t think were were thinking about the market size per se, but we intuitively understood that hair grows. There are enough people in the world who need personal care services, so we knew it was a big opportunity. The reactions we got when we were doing our research were surprising. The front desk staff told us about their current solution and said it’s the worst, it hasn’t been updated in eight years, etc. The emotional response was very powerful. The market had been overlooked for a long time, and we believe salons and spas need software specifically tailored to them. [22:47] When you were creating your MVP, how did you decide what to put in to keep it manageable and know if you were on the right track? The rule of thumb is to create the lightest possible MVP. We were entering a brownfield opportunity—a market with a lot of existing solutions that are dying and not innovating. The barrier to entry was pretty high. We needed to create the full product. It was not a lean MVP, and we knew going in that it would be a bit of a slog to build out. We tried to de-risk the MVP as much as possible by doing a ton of interviews and talking with people from the industry. We knew if we got the MVP right it could really snowball from there. Sean and I spent nine months building the MVP and getting constant feedback. [25:09] What kind of feedback did you get and what did you learn from it? The problem we wanted to solve first was making sure appointments were booked back-to-back. We saw that as the highest leverage value proposition because no one was doing it and that’s where all the pain came from for these businesses. We focused on that, and we also built the MVP in a way that was compatible to scale. We were really tuned into the competitive landscape. We had a list of the top 15 existing solutions and exactly what they could do. Through research, direct conversations, observation of customers, and competitive intelligence, we were able to create the lightest MVP possible. We took mockups to different salons, barber shops, and spas and showed different flows for client booking. Before we went deep into building, we validated our ideas through these mockups. Sometimes products managers are afraid to get in front of the customer. You can learn so much by meeting your customer and observing them. For the first two years of our company, we worked on location at salons, spas, and barber shops. I worked the front desk and Sean was in the back coding new features in real time. We observed the business for a long period of time and built the features we needed to onboard customers. Then we would babysit to make sure everything was working optimally. Our system is very different from our competitors’ because the amount of information we were able to learn through firsthand observation was incredible. I can’t overstate the importance of being truly dialed in to what your customers need. Action Guide: Put the information Matt shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful link: Learn more about Boulevard Innovation Quote “The brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something. Because the brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want it badly enough. They’re there to stop the other people.” – Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture Thanks! Thank you for taking the journey to product mastery and learning with me from the successes and failures of product innovators, managers, and developers. If you enjoyed the discussion, help out a fellow product manager by sharing it using the social media buttons you see below. Source

How product managers can get customer insights from a community to create a competitive advantage Three years ago I was looking for a wifi camera I could put in our RV so I could check on our dog when we needed to leave her in the motorhome. The leading brand cost about $150. I tried a brand that was new to me offering a wifi camera for $29. It worked great with the cloud features I expected. This year I was looking for a robotic vacuum cleaner for our house. The highly rated and recognized brand was about $800. I went back to the company I got the camera from and learned they also had a robotic vacuum, complete with LIDAR, which I got on a Cyber Monday sale for $200.  I wanted to learn how this company creates competitive products, differentiating on cost while offering comparative capabilities that equate to much higher value for customers. Today, we get to find out together as the VP of Product for Wyze joins us. His name is Steve McIrvin and we met a few years as we both had kids competing in Science Olympiad. Before joining Wyze, Steve was last at Amazon. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [3:15] How does Wyze compete? Wyze is a home automation company that is community-driven. A group of passionate users in our social media and forum communities drives our roadmap and and helps us understand the problems we need to solve. From there, if we’re getting into a brand new category, we follow a fast-follower strategy. We help external engineers understand the product requirements and user needs and rely on their expertise. For our core business like cameras, plugs, and bulbs, we’re investing in internal innovation, especially artificial intelligence. We’re pushing the boundaries of computer vision and machine learning. For example, the Wyze Cam, a security camera, detects people, pets, and packages, and we’re beta testing face recognition. When our customers want a new solution, we try to find that solution, invent something, or enhance the features of an existing product. For example, people who had the Wyze Cam were looking for a way to power it, because they didn’t have an outdoor outlet near the camera. We came up with the solution of putting an adapter with a USB port in a light bulb socket. The light bulb still screws in the socket, and the USB port power the camera. We were extending an adjacent capability. This is the most fun kind of innovation—when you can quickly see a problem and immediately come up with a novel solution. [8:00] Tell us more about how you’re developing your core capabilities, especially AI visual recognition. One of our new service features is Wyze Anything Recognition. Training a computer vision model is very hard and usually requires an AI research team, but we wanted to make that problem accessible to anyone. Wyze’s tagline is to make great technology accessible. If you have a use case where you want your camera to recognize something, you can train it to do that. For example, my kids are always leaving their laundry in the washing machine, so I can put a camera there and train it to recognize the closed and open washing machine and trigger an alert when it sees an undesirable state. There are probably a hundred different problems like that around your home that you could use this feature to solve. We’ve done limited beta testing on the Wyze Anything Recognition so far, but the results have been good. We get suggestions that we can put in our main model, like people want it to recognize a dog barking or baby crying. When someone in our community takes a video, the app asks if they would like to submit the video to improve Wyze’s AI. A lot of people submit those, so we get the training data we need to make the program better for the community. [12:08] How did the community become a core aspect of Wyze’s strategy? Our CEO calls our community the crown jewels. We protect them and are amazed at how much they contribute. When we started in 2017, a lot of people didn’t want to spend $150 on a camera. When we came out with the $19.99 Wyze Cam, we inadvertently developed an amazing, passionate community of early adopters who told all their friends about it, and it went word-of-mouth viral. We asked them what other products they would use. The reception to all these products has been very strong. Every launch of a new generation of camera has been stronger and stronger, driven by huge spikes in interest when we tell our community members about them. [14:2] How do you use the community and keep people engaged? People engage with us on multiple different levels. We have several different Facebook groups, and several of them include people who volunteer to help shepherd others. I meet with those volunteers at least monthly to listen to their opinions and make them feel like Wyze employees. They do a ton of work on Wyze’s behalf, so they’re like superstar employees. We always include them on our early betas and on alphas if we can. They give us raw feedback and make our products so much better. They do the very complex tests not even our internal people are doing. As we grow with new categories, the complexity grows exponentially. We’re looking for people who have a ton of Wyze devices and devices from other manufacturers to see how well they work together. Folks in our community are extremely diligent about doing regression testing on all the combinations and permutations that would be in the real world, so we can see how it will scale to a larger customer base. Our community is a huge competitive advantage, and it really impacts our vision of making great technology accessible to everyone. Accessible means it can be used successfully by someone who’s not a smart home techie, and it’s a low enough price that customers can afford to bring it into their homes. We heavily rely on our community to tell us when we don’t meet the bar, and we’ve killed some products after beta testing when they didn’t meet it. [19:59] What do you do as VP of Product to make the community work? Listening is the most important skill I can bring to the table. I’m not connected with specific details, so I might not have used a feature a customer is talking about, but I will listen, take good notes, and go back to find out what we can do to make the experience better. We don’t just give lip service to customer feedback. We implement the feedback, find the root causes of problems, and figure out where we need to improve to make the overall ecosystem and customer experience better. I let our community in on secret insights. For the last few months, I’ve been sharing our roadmap. I’m super open about what’s coming and what we’re excited about. The community is very passionate about hearing insider knowledge, and they feel included in the “employee” secret group. We only share the roadmap with people who have really proven themselves and are very invested in the ecosystem, and we have nondisclosure agreements. When I first joined Wyze, the first thing I noticed is that every member of the community referred to the products as our products. They felt like they were already part of Wyze. That warms my heart because we’re on the same team and doing this together. It’s encouraging to me to see that we’re unleashing technology that people are solving problems with, enjoying using, and getting a lot out of. We flood them with alpha, beta and finished hardware. We also provide some exclusive treats like a Wyze Cam in a specific color for our top volunteers. [27:03] Is your community composed of only lead users? How do you make sure it’s representative of your market? Our community is all power users, and sometimes I have to explain to the community leaders that we’re making a decision to reach a different market segment. The power users use 100% of the features, and if we came out with every feature they request, it would be too costly and overwhelming, so it wouldn’t be accessible. We create simpler products that the majority of our users will use, and we let the power users know about some workarounds and hacks to get our products to do what they want. Action Guide: Put the information Steve shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links: Learn more about Wyze Join the Wyze Community on Facebook Innovation Quote “Around here, however, we don’t look backwards for very long. We keep moving forward, opening up new doors and doing new things, because we’re curious . . . and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.” – Walt Disney, Meet the Robinsons Movie 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 from a product manager’s experiences at Google and YouTube Most of us have become product managers and then moved on (or will move on) to product leadership based on our experiences and knowledge. We encounter tools along the way—some that are helpful and some that are not. I want to explore experiences that help you be a better product professional. Joining us is a Tom Leung, Director of Product Management at Google Health and previously at YouTube. He also hosts the Fireside Product Management podcast. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [1:59] What was your path to product management? I started my career in management consulting because I wanted to be a business leader. Later I founded a startup and then worked in business development at Microsoft. I realized I was most excited about the solution and customer experience. I switched to product management and never left. In product management, you can connect the dots and be as close as you can to running things. It gives you control, accountability, and a wide breadth of problems to solve. The PM role gives you the opportunity to have influence in all areas of the company and a lot of flexibility. You can stay in the role for a long time and still have diverse experiences. [8:10] What experience provided growth for you early in your career? The failures are punctuated in my memory. The startup I founded in 1999 with my brother was a good example. I was enrolled at Harvard Business School and I thought I was hot stuff. I learned the hard way how hard businesses are to create. One of the many reasons we failed is our product didn’t really solve a big enough problem for customers, and we weren’t solving it sufficiently well. Many of us constantly relearn that lesson. We get distracted by technology, business opportunity, or the desire to focus entirely on internal execution, and we forget that to stand out we need to solve a big problem for customers in a way that is 10 times better than current solutions. [11:35] Can you tell us more about the problem you were trying to solve and what mistakes you made? The idea was to provide a free video streaming service and fund it with video ads inserted in the middle of the videos. The problem we were trying to solve was to provide consumers with a wider range of content choices beyond movie theaters, DVDs, or cable TV. Ironically, I later worked at YouTube, so I think this was a very real problem, but the way we solved it was very transactional. We licensed video content from film makers and rolled it into a single portal. It was decent, but we had poor bandwidth and the content was not great. Some users sent us content they wanted us to put up, but we said no because we thought it was user-generated trash and advertisers wouldn’t want to spend money showing ads next to content that wasn’t professionally developed. In hindsight, they were giving us free content we could just benefit from. [14:38] What is a more recent experience that helped you become a product leader? I spent four years at YouTube rebuilding the creator platform. I was a high performer but not one of the top three or four product managers. I wondered what I could learn from that, so I reached out to my peers, manager, and skip level and asked for feedback. People will give great feedback if you ask for it. My skip level was so glad I was asking because many people don’t ask for feedback. It’s great to have these conversations even when you’re no longer in the reporting chain, because your managers can be as unvarnished as possible. The theme I heard from the people I talked with was that people loved working with me, but I could have done a better job forcing them to have harder conversations and make harder choices earlier. I was very agreeable and tried to get everyone together, but when a hard call was made, I could have made it in a third of the time. That’s one of the things that separates amazing product directors from strongly exceeding ones. [18:19] How did you implement this feedback? It’s hard to make hard calls because even if you are personally ready often decisions are consensus-driven and cross-functional, and some hard decisions have an impact on different people. The trick is to make sure you’re not the victim of your own blind spots. Bring people along to make the call. Help the organization officially make it together and stick to it. Do it in a way that minimizes disruption. Someone will be impacted in a negative way, and that’s delicate. You can’t just go kick the door and say a project should be killed. On the other hand, you don’t want to be in a situation where two years later the project gets deprecated and everybody knows it should have been deprecated before. There’s always tensions between those two extremes. [21:17] What are the characteristics of product managers who excel? Ability to build trust across the team in your judgement, motivation, and ability to execute. Ability to clearly communicate and distill complex things into bite-sized approaches to solving a problem. The mini CEO mentality—you have to write the roadmap but you’re also the one turning over rocks, constantly trying to do everything you can to make the product successful. Curiosity—great PMs are always interested in learning, asking why, and digging as deep as they can. Action Guide: Put the information Tom shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links: Connect with Tom on LinkedIn Check out Tom’s Fireside Product Management Podcast Learn about Tom’s career coaching Check out the Google Careers site Innovation Quote “In the poker game of life, you can’t control the cards you are dealt, but you can control how you play them.” – 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

Innovate for the future – for product managers Is your organization innovative? Is innovation part of the culture and an aspect of the organization’s reputation? Or is innovation something that is just talked about, but you know real action isn’t taking place—what’s been called Innovation Theater. If so, today we are talking about changing that—how organizations can be more innovative and the action leaders need to take to make it happen. To help us is Tendayi Viki. He is a returning guest, having joined us in episode 308. Tendayi is an author and innovation consultant. He holds a PhD in Psychology and an MBA. He is also an Associate Partner at Strategyzer, where he helps large organizations innovate for the future while managing their core business. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:03] How do you help companies innovate for the future? Organizational leadership is stewardship. Half the job is helping the company succeed right now, and the other half is setting up the company to survive and thrive into the future. Surviving into the future requires coming up with new things that are future-facing. [4:05] How do you transform the organization to be able to do both of those jobs? The first step is philosophical alignment with the belief that human life is a mixture of daily bread and planting for the next season. For example, if you get drawn into tasks and forget to take a walk, it’s not good for your future capability. Make hay while the sun shines. It’s hard to make hay while the sun is shining, because you want to go to the beach and surf. People need a philosophical buy-in; otherwise they’re being dragged to a trough they don’t want to drink from. [7:00] What do we need to put in place so we can innovate for the future? Embrace the idea that first we shape the tools and then the tools shape us. Every organization has tools it uses, but often we take those for granted and nobody challenges the underlying philosophy. Large organizations tend to struggle with innovation because they apply their core business processes to innovation since those are the tools they have on hand. They’re picking up harvesting tools for planting. The worlds of innovation and core business need different management tools, processes, and philosophy. Core business uses execution tools. Innovation uses design tools. Buckminster Fuller said, “Rather than argue with people about their behavior, just give them a tool that is an expression of the behaviors you want them to show, and by using the tool, they get to embody the process.” If you try to change someone’s mindset, but they don’t have the tools to do anything differently, their mind may be changed, but they can’t manifest that in any way. It’s better to give people tools that allow them to manifest the right behaviors, and you’ll see the mindset shifts happen over time. [12:22] Can you tell us a story about providing the right tools? I was helping an organization make investment decisions on new products, and I sat in on their process. Their R&D scientists were coming up with great inventions, but then the scientists had to fill in a long business case. After that, they came to a session where the questioning was brutal. Leadership asked customer-based questions like “Have you sold anything yet? How do you know what customers want?” The organization was convinced the brutality of the questioning extracted the truth. I had to convince them there was no truth to be found. They could be as brutal as they wanted, but the R&D scientists didn’t know the answers to the questions. They needed to create a preceding process where the scientists could gather data about customers to answer the questions. After that, the questioning would produce truth. The question in innovation is how much are you willing to pay for that initial process? Typically, your organization will give you money if you promise a return, but in this context they’re giving money because you’re promising answers to questions, but you’re not promising what the answers are going to be. You might or might not find that there is value to be created. [15:41] How can we decide how much to invest to get information on what will create value for customers? It depends on the industry, but there are a few overarching principles. Don’t build anything tangible before you know exactly what the customer needs and wants. Don’t build the expensive product before you build prototypes and see whether the value proposition resonates. Don’t start manufacturing before you get the price point that customers are willing to pay. Consider how much money a team would need to get answers to these questions in your industry. Answer the first question (what does your customer need?) first. If you get a positive answer, invest more and go to the next level of questions. Use this process to create an innovation framework—a different system for managing innovation than for managing the core business. [18:37] How do we find out what customers want without building a prototype? To compete against luck, as Clayton Christensen said, you need a deep understanding of customers, their context, jobs-to-be-done, things they’re trying to accomplish, and things that get in their way. The more you know, the better innovator you become. Taking a prototype into your first conversations hurts your ability to learn, because you’ve already placed a solution in front of the customer. You’ll get feedback on the solution, but it won’t help you get a deep, empathic understanding of the customer. You can have an initial series of experiments to get empathy, then use that empathy to design your first prototype, then double check whether what you heard was correct. You can do all this in your early stage of testing. [20:54] What can you do when you encounter a leader who thinks you’ll find out what the customer needs after you launch the product? I ask them to write down the last four projects that they thought were going to be really successful and invested money in only to find the projects didn’t work out. Then I ask if they would have wanted to know that it wouldn’t work before they invested money. Sometimes leaders can still be very resistant and you have to just walk away from them. Action Guide: Put the information Tendayi shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links: Visit Tendayi’s website Learn more about Strategyzer Innovation Quote “Almost by definition, a single person could not alone create an innovation.” – Jon Gertner Thanks! Thank you for taking the journey to product mastery and learning with me from the successes and failures of product innovators, managers, and developers. If you enjoyed the discussion, help out a fellow product manager by sharing it using the social media buttons you see below. Source

How to tap into the valuable resources your legal counsel can provide – for product managers Today we are talking about product leaders using legal resources. When and why should product VPs, CPOs, and other senior product roles involve legal resources? While that question is directed to executive team roles, I expect product managers will also discover how legal resources can be wisely leveraged. Joining us is Ryan Lewendon, partner at the Giannuzzi Lewendon Law Firm, helping founders navigate growth and reach their full potential. He has helped several brands grow and overcome obstacles, especially consumer product companies. This has included successful exits with acquisitions by companies that include Coke, General Mills, Boulder Brands, Bacardi, and more. I’m looking forward to learning from his experience. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:29] What kind of law do you practice? We focus on fast-growing, disruptive consumer products companies—anything you put in or on your body. My partner and I were the first lawyers for Vitamin Water from when it was just an idea until we sold it to Coke for $4.7 billion. We did every corporate legal thing they needed. After that we realized there weren’t a lot of lawyers interested in helping disruptive brands, and we had a great playbook for how to build a disruptive business and an aptitude for working with the underdogs in consumer packaged goods (CPG). Now we work with over a thousand companies, from huge companies to startups, over their whole lifecycles. We work in several verticals. We help companies with financing. We have experience and downstream vision to help companies know what they should and shouldn’t do when they’re raising capital at different stages and negotiating with investors to set up for longterm success. We help companies spend money to implement their plan. We help them solve the problems directly in front of them and the problems down the line to help the company grow all the way through an exit. [10:48] How can products leaders and managers do a better job engaging legal resources to help create a new product? Lawyers get a bad rap for being people who say no and stifle innovation, but they can provide valuable resources. A good in-house legal counsel is a translator between the C-suite executives and the external legal counsel. They’re going to communicate whatever you put forth to the external counsel, and how it’s presented will have a big impact on whether you get a rubber stamp. If you can get the in-house counsel on board with what you’re trying to do, you’ll have a much higher chance of success. Establish trust with your in-house counsel. Don’t hide parts of the story from them. Tell them all the issues, the reason you’re creating this product, and what you’re hoping to achieve. Talk through the negatives first. Tell them the issues that might be problematic and explain how you’re going to deal with them. Business people focus on the upsides and winning scenarios. Lawyers look at the downsides and worst cases. If you provide a proposal that looks at the upsides, acknowledges the downsides, and describes mitigators for those downsides, you’ve done a lot of the in-house counsel’s job. All they have to do is translate it to the external counsel. [17:02] When does the external counsel get involved? A good in-house counsel does almost no legal work. They’re just a conduit between the company and the external counsel. There are lots of legal issues at a company, and the in-house counsel can’t address them all themselves. Also, using external counsel provides a professional coverage against liability. You can’t choose your in-house counsel , but you can choose your external counsel. When you’re trying to get a disruptive innovation passed, picking the external counsel is extremely important. Choose an external counsel that has contextual experience in your field. Lawyers are typically risk-averse, so if you’re working with someone who does not have a great grasp on the industry or your idea, they’ll probably say no pretty quickly. It’s easy to say there’s risk, but it’s harder to understand the dynamics and nuances of a situation to identify where risks can be lessened. Lawyers will only have that ability through a contextual understanding of the industry you’re in. Look for lawyers who are interested in your project. Choose a firm that typically operates in the industry you’re in and with the matters and clients you work with. [22:48] If a company is thinking about creating a disruptive product and deciding between building the product themselves vs. buying a company that might help them, what should they consider? Consider whether a company or brand is situated such that paying for it outweighs the benefits of internally developing it. Distill down what you would be getting if you buy the company. In consumer goods, generally you’re buying the brand, including the trademark, customer list, and customer affinity. You might also be purchasing intellectual property (IP), including trade secrets and patents. Sometimes you’re buying an opportunity or something that will allow you to make the product more quickly or easily. All these considerations inform the structure and timing of your deal and the amount you should be willing to pay. [25:19] How can we build a relationship with our legal counsel to get over fears about engaging with them and be able to use their valuable resources? Lawyers are risk-averse. If you come to them at the last minute with a project you need signed off on or you don’t tell the whole story, it’s harder for them to analyze it. Give them a heads-up. Tell them what you’re working on and let them know you would love to do a deep dive on it with them. As a product manager or leader, building trust with your in-house legal counsel is super important. If they understand you, it will be easier for them to have a full grasp of your project and get the analysis done more quickly and efficiently. Take your counsel out for a drink and talk about your project in that low-stress setting. Action Guide: Put the information Ryan shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links: Connect with Ryan on LinkedIn or Instagram Learn more about the Gianuzzi Lewendon Law Firm Innovation Quote “There is a way to do it better. Find it.” – Thomas Edison Thanks! Thank you for taking the journey to product mastery and learning with me from the successes and failures of product innovators, managers, and developers. If you enjoyed the discussion, help out a fellow product manager by sharing it using the social media buttons you see below. Source

What product managers need to know about entering a crowded product category Today we are discussing crowded product categories and the challenges when trying to enter them with a new product. For context, we’ll use the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) category, which is indeed crowded. Joining us is Jeroen Corthout, co-founder of Salesflare, the simple yet powerful CRM.  This is a topic I’m close to as I have been evaluating CRMs to keep track of the guests I have on this podcast as well as the companies I have the pleasure of helping to improve their product management and innovation. In full disclosure, Salesflare gave me a license to use their CRM at no cost. For this episode, what I’m interested in is what Jeroen learned entering such a crowded market. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [3:20] Why does the world need another CRM solution? Eight years ago I had a software company, and we were looking for a CRM tool to help us follow up our sales leads better. I had used Salesforce in the past and knew it wasn’t a great practical tool for the end user. We found some small business CRMs that still fell short for us because they only worked if we did an enormous amount of work—constantly typing in information. We wondered if we could build our own CRM that collects information automatically. We created a CRM system that collects information on your contacts from your emails, calendar, and phone. That became the basis for Salesflare, a tool with which you can follow up leads, prospects, and customers in a much easier way because the system provides you all the information about them, which you can then build on and organize. [8:19] Tell us more about your product journey that led to creating a CRM company. As we tried several existing solutions, we noticed what worked well about them and what problems we still had. We did a lot of experimentation. We built a prototype and got excepted in an incubator and accelerator. After that we started building the CRM tool and did customer interviews, because we knew what we wanted, but we didn’t know what other people wanted. [17:30] How did you find people to interview and what did you ask them? We had an idea of the types of companies we wanted to go after—companies that sell through email and phone calls. We decided to interview VPs of sales and salespeople. I reached out to people I knew, and at the end of each interview I asked them if they knew three other people who would be interested in being interviewed. We showed people the product and got feedback. We discovered we needed to make the software a bit more clear and simple. Our software can be used like a normal CRM, even though it works differently, but sometimes people try the software and don’t see it’s different. When you’re entering a crowded category, you want to differentiate yourself sharply, but if you differentiate too much people won’t get it. [21:28] What good decisions did you make and what did you get wrong along the way? A lot of SaaS companies put up a webpage and let people try their software, but this doesn’t allow you to get much information about people’s experience. Instead, I got in contact with all the customers who wanted a trial version. I gave them a demo, understood their needs and context, showed them the software, and took notes about their experience. We set up the software together and saw the moments when it didn’t work like we expected. Staying close to the customer saved us in the early days, because if we hadn’t done that I don’t think we would have been able to evolve the product as well as we have. In the beginning we were very bad at structuring and prioritizing feedback. If we had done it earlier, it would have saved us a lot of time. We were just scribbling feedback in a Google doc, and it was very badly organized and prioritized. Now we have a clear system We know what to tackle first and why customers asked about an issue. Action Guide: Put the information Jeroen shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links: Learn more about Salesflare Check out the Salesflare YouTube channel Connect with Jeroen on LinkedIn Innovation Quote “Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re going to get.” – Forrest Gump 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

When to use Agile and when to consider other options – for product managers charset=Ascii Today we are talking about when to use or not to use Agile for your product projects. Products need to get released quickly and correctly, creating more value for customers. Is Agile the answer? Maybe, but the details matter. To explore the topic with us, Mark Madsen is here to share his experience. He has built and led project organizations in a variety of companies, including Lego, Saab, and Danfoss. He has seen the conditions needed for Agile to work well and when it doesn’t. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:48] What does Agile mean in the context of developing products? Agile means a lot of different things to different companies and individuals. To me,  Agile is related to flexibility and is an umbrella term for practices like Scrum and Safe. [5:29] What are the characteristics of projects that benefit from Agile? Agile works well when there’s uncertainty. I started out using Agile in the software and electronics world, which was very uncertain, and I saw Scrum was really beneficial there. I thought Scrum was the silver bullet for everything until I came to a company that was not as complex and was doing production, which needs to be stable. For the first time, I saw that Scrum did not work. When I came upon Dave Snowden’s work, I realized it’s all about complexity. When you have complex, unpredictable tasks, Agile makes sense. When you have less uncertainty and can plan everything upfront, then use the waterfall methods. [7:21] Tell us more about Snowden’s framework. Snowden divides projects into four habitats. First is the clear world which includes tasks you just go do. For example, tying your shoes is easy and you can easily teach it. This category also includes team-based tasks; for example, if I need to dig trenches I can tell my team to dig the trenches, they can come back when they’re done, and we don’t need to discuss that. Second is the complicated world where we can predict problems but might not understand them. For example, if my car breaks down I might not know how to fix it, so I would take it to a mechanic. If I take it to someone who is not an expert, they won’t fix my car. You need great teams and knowledgeable people who have done it before. Involve experts from different area of the company, analyze the problem or project, and create and execute a plan. Third is the complex world where things stop being predictable. For example, no matter how much you analyze the stock market, you cannot fully predict how it is going to go up and down. If I plant ten seeds and treat them exactly the same, I will not get ten trees that are 100% alike. People aren’t predictable. You can crack a joke in one room and have everyone laugh then tell the joke to another room and no one laughs, and you don’t understand why. Last is the chaotic world where a crisis is happening and we react. If the house is on fire, we do not sit down and think; we run for the door. We need to treat these different worlds differently. What works in one world does not necessarily work effectively in the other worlds. In the clear world, you have one step and the job gets done great every time. In the complicated world, you need processes, best practices, and tools. In the complex world, you should be ready to create processes. An important part of Agile is learning—starting with something and modifying and adapting it to the reality that you’re only just finding out. [17:27] If Agile isn’t a good fit, what other options should companies consider? In the complex world, Scrum can be a great place to start, but it must not be implemented too rigidly. If it is, the benefits will be hit-or-miss, and you might end up with something that does not work. You need to train people to use Scrum and other frameworks like Kanban, Extreme Programming, or SAFE, and empower your team to choose the right tools to solve problems. [22:56] How can we deal with friction between the Agile team and the rest of the organization? For example, marketing might say there is a nine-month deadline, and the Agile team says it’s going to do sprints every two weeks and see what’s done in nine months, creating conflict between marketing and the Agile team. When you have a problem like this, you need to have a discussion. Make it clear you’re facing a complex problem that isn’t predictable. In the past, you’ve made plans that didn’t hold, so you need to investigate the problem more. You’re facing reality when you say you’re not sure what you’ll be able to deliver at the nine-month deadline. Communicate what you’ll be doing. Explain that Agile gives you flexibility. It works well when you communicate with each other and get on the same page. [26:50] Can you share a story about when Agile worked well? When I was at Danfoss, we got a really good Agile implementation going by empowering project managers and training people in using Agile but not setting up a rigid framework. We delivered the first project that was ever delivered on time and reduced time-to-market from five years to one year. Action Guide: Put the information Mark shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links: Connect with Mark on LinkedIn Visit the Aspire Innovation website Listen to episode 366: This is modified Agile for hardware development Innovation Quote “Don’t just ‘Go Agile!’”  -Mark Madsen Thanks! Thank you for taking the journey to product mastery and learning with me from the successes and failures of product innovators, managers, and developers. If you enjoyed the discussion, help out a fellow product manager by sharing it using the social media buttons you see below. Source

How to load up your brain with your customers’ mindset How do you figure out what your customers want? Stop and think about it for a few seconds. Is your product work based on what Sales wants, what an Executive or other HiPPO wants, what your competitor is doing, some insights gained about your customers, or something else? While we all have constraints, insights about the people using our products and the needs they have help us develop better products. To explore getting customer insights, Mike Mace is with us. He leads market strategy for UserTesting, which is a firm that helps you experience what your customers experience, getting human insights within just a few hours to help you design and deliver exceptional products. Mike has a long history in product work, spending a decade at Apple, helping Silicon Graphics, then contributing to growth at Palm, as well as assisting other organizations to be more successful with their products. He is going to help us learn how to quickly get customer insights for our product work. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [3:44] How do we get better insights about our customers? It’s not about asking your customers what they want; it’s about figuring out what they need and what you would they would like you to do for them. On the other hand, don’t be arrogant—there are a lot of companies that say they know what the customer needs, but it doesn’t work at all. If you’re not getting inside your customers’ heads, you won’t be able to produce market traction on anything new. My favorite example comes from my time at Apple. We did enormous quantitative surveys and asked customers which features they wanted. Consistently, a bigger hard drive and more memory were ranked highest, and multimedia features were ranked lowest. We executed on those findings, but the company was gradually dying. In the late 1990s, Steve Jobs came back and said we were going to work on multimedia features. He understood we didn’t need something of mediocre interest to 90% of customers; we needed something 10% of people will absolutely adore. Intelligently parsing customer feedback to solve a problem that is compelling to a certain segment of the audience as opposed to blindly following customers’ requests turned the company around. Following an overall average inevitably makes you mediocre. It’s not that you shouldn’t take any customer feedback. It’s what you do with it that matters. [10:05] What should we avoid when we’re trying to understand customers’ needs? Don’t over-rely on proxies. A lot of people need to do discovery but don’t have time to talk to their regular customers, so they use people they’ve talked with in the past, friends and family, or only customers in their city. That’s better than nothing, but when you go to the same people repeatedly they turn into insiders. During COVID, many people used social media to get customer feedback, but the voices on social media are self-selected and systematically biased because those most active on social media are not average people—they’re fanatics. When you use these proxies, you end up designing the product for the 5% who are fanatics rather than the core of the market. [13:01] How do we get actionable feedback? I grew up in the old world of market research, which relied on slow, expensive focus groups. Now through technology it’s possible to get video feedback from people for just about anything you want within a couple of hours. They can record themselves interacting with anything you can show on a computer screen or completing any task you ask them to do. User testing is a way to get regular people to respond to any prompt—a marketing message, a product question, a discovery point. You get more candor when someone is talking to their computer than when they’re talking to a live interviewer. You can get this feedback within a few hours or a couple of days at most. There are huge areas where we all guess regularly because we’re not used to having feedback available. Now getting feedback has sped up so there’s no excuse for making an important decision blindly. Think about how many guesses you make each week and how much risk that introduces into your product. Why are you doing that when you have the option to get really fast feedback? We don’t have to guess anymore. [18:22] How can we use user testing to better test hypotheses? Many companies assume the best way to test hypotheses is to fail fast. But it’s better to not fail in the first place. If you can use user testing to get it 90% right the first time, you’ll have more credibility as a PM, you’ll save money because you’re doing fewer sprints, and your engineers will be more motivated because you’re not asking them to do as much rework. You’ll still occasionally fail and learn from it, but you’ll have less failure and get it right more quickly. [20:12] Can you take us through an example of how we would construct a test to get customer insights? When you’re in the discovery phase and need feedback from customers, you have two choices. Number one, though our system at UserTesting and other systems like it, you can rapidly recruit, schedule, and record live discovery interviews. Within a day, you can chose your target demographics and availability, automatically record your video sessions, and cut out clips to share. Number two, you can ask people to respond to a list of questions and record themselves. The return time is even faster because you don’t have to be in the interview with those people, and you get more candid responses. Start with just one person responding to make sure your questions are clear. Then get a few more interviews. You don’t need a statistically significant sample. Watch a few interviews and see if you’re hearing the same stuff. If not, do a few more until you start to hear repeated themes. Do just enough to map out how customers think. This is about loading up your brain with the customers’ mindset so you can make good decisions on their behalf. You can also get feedback after the discovery phase—to prioritize features, resolve an argument within the team, validate or invalidate a VP’s idea, and test first-time user experience when you’re launching a product. Action Guide: Put the information Mike shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful link: Learn more about UserTesting Innovation Quote “If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there.” – Lewis Carroll 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