Product Mastery Now for Product Managers, Leaders, and Innovators

How product managers and leaders break through challenges Tom Leung is the Director of Product Management at Google Health and was previously at YouTube. He also hosts the Fireside Product Management podcast. This is a special episode of the Product Mastery Now podcast as Tom is interviewing me. He invited me as a guest on his Fireside podcast. We had a great discussion and I wanted to share it here as well. We covered several topics, with a focus on recommendations for overcoming challenges organizations and product leaders encounter developing products customers love. They are: Lead with the Problem, Not the Solution Start with Strategy Engage Customers Share High-Value Resources Clarify the Customers Portfolio Management Project Selection Do More With Less Manage the Product Lifecycle Maximize the Benefit of a Product Process Click here to get a PDF with more information about each recommendation. Useful links: Tom’s FiresidePM podcast 10 Changes Product Teams Should Make Now to Consistently Launch Products Customers Love   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 achieve transformational listening Today we are talking about listening. How would you rate yourself as a listener? I consider it a superpower for product managers and innovators, because proper listening is a key way to learn what customers need. It is also a behavior of those gaining influence in their organizations. To help all of us better develop this superpower, Christine Miles joins us. She is the author of What Is It Costing You Not to Listen: The Power of Understanding to Connect, Influence, Solve & Sell. For three decades, Christine has been helping organizations improve by applying human skills to drive results and build cultures of empathy. Teaching people to listen differently has been a big part her work. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:55] Through working with CEOs, what have you learned about the importance of listening? CEOs know listening is important, but they often haven’t taught people how to do it. Performance is accelerated by emotional acuity, not just intelligence. Superstars have both emotional intelligence and technical skills. [5:34] What’s a story of a failure that happened because people weren’t listening well? We tend to overestimate our listening skills, and none of our education systems teach listening skills. We’re all failing to listen, because we’re not equipped to know how to do it. I was on a very technical call with engineers who had delivered an energy-saving product and were validating the results. The engineers and the customer thought they were talking about the same thing, but they weren’t on the same page at all. The engineers weren’t hearing what the customer was asking for. Fortunately, the head of sales had been trained in how to listen differently, and he intervened and got them aligned so the engineers could solve the right problem. The main failure that results from not listening is we end up solving the wrong problems. [9:36] What is the foundation of listening differently? Listening differently or transformational listening goes beyond attentive listening. Just paying attention is a low bar to achieve. To listen differently, we need to understand and uncover insight. When you do that, you’ve earned the right to solve the problem. [12:56] How can product managers avoid falling in love with their solution and thinking they’re listening when they’re actually filtering information through the framework of what they believe the customer needs? The brain is the enemy of listening. We’re all telling ourselves a story, which can contaminate what the customer may really need. You can’t white-knuckle your way to listening differently. You wouldn’t go into the woods to get over the mountains without tools in your backpack, but we go into important conversations without being prepared, thinking we can white-knuckle our way to the other side of the woods. [15:44] What tools do we need to listen differently? The most powerful story you can tell someone is their own. We influence people by understanding their stories. Understanding and saying we understand have nothing to do with each other. If I reflect, confirm, and validate what you said, then we truly have understanding. Every time you’re in a conversation, a story is happening, and you need to understand the story to discover the insight. Some of the most important tools are the Six Most Powerful Questions: Take me back to the beginning. People tend to start in the middle of their story and go forward, but we need to go backward so we’re on the path together. Asking why questions can cause people to shut down rather than open up. Asking where the story starts causes them to relax and open up. Tell me more. Then what happened? How does that make you feel? The first three questions are factual, but asking an emotional questions is incredibly important. It might seem uncomfortable, but people will answer it, and the results are very powerful. Hmm. This is similar to Tell me more but avoids interrupting the speaker. It sounds like you feel _____. You can ask these questions in any order you want, as often as you want, and they will get you the majority of the story. You can also use the affirmation tool of asking Do I get you? to see if you’re getting alignment and connection. For every three to five technical questions, ask one emotional question, which will open up both emotions and facts of the story. Action Guide: Put the information Christine shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links: Check out Christine’s book What Is It Costing You Not to Listen? Learn more about EQuipt Innovation Quote “Any fool can know.  The point is to understand.” – Albert Einstein “Understand first.” – Christine Miles 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 CTOs contribute to innovation and product management superiority Today we are talking about senior roles that contribute to innovation, specifically the role of CTO (Chief Technology Officer). Product managers and leaders interact with many people in their organizations, and knowing how to leverage professional relationships is important to success. Joining us is Steve Orrin, CTO at Intel. Steve orchestrates and executes customer engagements in the federal space, overseeing the development of products to address challenges in government enterprise, national security, and other federal areas of focus. He has a reputation as an industry leader, leveraging a history of delivering results in Innovation, Intrapreneurship, and Entrepreneurship.  Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [1:52] What’s your role like as Federal Chief Technology Officer (CTO)? My role is to be the interface between federal customers, the ecosystem that services them, our product line, and the product managers, engineering teams, and executives. I help translate and architect our technologies to match government’s missions and unique challenges. I lead our innovation teams, which are working directly with government customers on technical challenges. This comes in two forms: federalized commercial technology, which is modifying technology that works in other industries for the federal problem set, and pathfinding on new capabilities. [5:43] How have you seen the CTO role differ in different organizations? I’ve seen four types of CTO roles: The startup CTO is the Jack of all trades. Their role is to get their hands dirty and initiate the innovation that leads to the first prototype. The CTO typically comes up with the first novel idea upon which everything gets built. Next, it’s important to collaborate early with product management and engineering to get a product from the prototype into the market and continue innovation to introduce future capabilities and evangelize what the product does. As a startup CTO, one of my first hires is a product manager, a key role in finding the requirements that meet the minimum viable product. After that, I bring in a VP of engineering who oversees the architects and developers. The CTO in a more established, larger company drives innovation and the incubation team. Once you have your product established, the CTO looks for the next big opportunity. The product-line CTO in large organizations owns a particular technology or product category. This is an evolution of the second type above to a larger scale. The field CTO is closely aligned with the sales and business development teams. They do technical evangelism, speak to customers, and become the voice of the customer to the organization. The fourth type is a blending of the other three roles, and is most closely aligned to my role. It involves product evangelism, being the voice of the customer, and driving innovation. [11:56] Can you compare and contrast your role as CTO with the roles of product VPs or product officers? At Intel, I work with product managers, engineering managers, and engineering directors. I think about now, next, and after. The VP of engineering is focused on now—building the product with the current requirements to get it out the door with the maximum amount of bug fixes in a particular timeframe with particular resources. The product manager is focused on the next—the key customer requirements we need to solve to continue to be viable and the bug fixes critical for customers. The next phase of innovation or after comes from the CTO. The CTO must manage the balance between product management, innovation, and engineering. The CTO is thinking about the next big non-organic growth opportunity, while the product manager is focused on solving the current customer’s problems, and the VP of engineering is managing resources. I negotiate among these roles. I need to understand the key things I want to get into the product today that help build out the capabilities for what’s next and after. Some of the best successes I’ve seen come from not solving the big problem today but putting key features into the road map so we have the building blocks for an innovation team to later build a novel capability on top of a core feature. You show that to a customer and get validation; then the product manager gets involved to build the big innovation. The most successful organizations have product management, engineering, and the CTO working together in tandem as peers. [17:14] How do CTOs contribute to innovation? The role of the CTO is to be the focal point for innovation. Successful CTOs drive and lead innovation but also recognize innovation can come from many places—engineering, product managers, the help desk, finance, etc. The CTO collects and fosters innovation and helps drive the transition to make products a reality. We navigate products out of the lab into the real world. The CTO is the voice of innovation for the company. Wherever innovation is happening, we foster it and encourage people to try new things. We’re the voice of innovation beyond the organization, allowing engineers and architects to speak about their innovations inside and outside the company. The CTO helps make sure innovation isn’t lost but is fostered and encouraged throughout the organization. [24:36] Have you had success letting customers co-develop products with you? Absolutely. When you put hook points into a feature, then you can build innovations off to the side later. For example, expose some APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) that you can later use to build widgets that demonstrate a new capability or add a new feature. When you get customers involved early in the development cycle, the product you end up with is much more aligned to what they need than to what you think they need. When I meet with customers, I don’t just have the VP of engineering and the VP of product management there—I also bring the engineers along. Even if they’re just listening, they can pick up on things we don’t and get inspired by something the customer says. It gives the developers a sense of ownership when they recognize they’re part of the conversation, which is invaluable for spawning innovation in interesting places. [28:50]  What can CTOs do to better interact with engineering and product VPs? Don’t make the relationship adversarial. Be the advocate of the VP of engineering, communicating to management why they need more resources or infrastructure. Help brief executives on the product, how the engineering process is going, why it matters to the customer, and how it drives revenue and new customer adoption. Have realistic expectations—there’s only so much code you can pump out in a day. Spend time with the engineering team to see their challenges, and be a resource for solving technical issues. The product VP, product management VP, and/or CPO, and CTO should be best buddies. We work in tandem together, because we’re trying to solve the same problem—what are the key requirements necessary to make our customer and company successful? There’s a lot of intersection between what’s next and what’s after next, so the CTO and product VP should be working together on the requirements definition. They each have different sources of information that can help the other make decisions. Action Guide: Put the information Steve shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links: Connect with Steve on LinkedIn Learn more about Steve’s work at Intel Innovation Quote “Surround yourself with people smarter than yourself and listen to them.” – Jim Collins 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 become change leaders Today we are talking about change. The very nature of our work as product managers and leaders creates change—we change existing products to make them more valuable to customers and our organization, and we create completely new products, which causes change to occur at many levels. Your work demands that you are competent leading change. To help us learn how to better manage the change our product projects create, Brendon Baker is with us. He has helped organizations across several industries navigate change created by large transformation projects. He is also the managing director of the firm Valuable Change Co and author of the book Valuable Change: What You Need to Know to Ensure Your Change Pays Off. I appreciate his personal mission statement, which is “Help Change Leaders Drive Real Value.” Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [1:58] How did you become the guy who helps organizations with change? As a child, I wanted to be an entrepreneur, and I didn’t want to do Business as Usual—doing the same thing every day scared me. I got into project management then consulting. Throughout my career, I saw a pattern: Change leadership made the difference in whether change was successful or not, yet those change leaders were essentially abandoned by the industry. There are not textbooks or certifications for change leadership. It’s assumed everyone can do it. I’ve found people can’t always do it—not from a lack of skills or capability but from a lack of support and knowledge. Change leaders default to running change based on time and cost, which doesn’t ultimately achieve the value they’re looking for. I founded Valuable Change Co to provide support without adding unnecessary complexity. My mission is to help change leaders drive real value, and my secondary mission is to fight unnecessary complexity. I’m providing knowledge about the key essence of change leadership and simple metrics or questions to maximize the value of what change can achieve. [9:51] Talk us through applying your framework to a real problem product managers encounter—when we develop a new product that disrupts an existing part of the organization’s business, causing many people to try to kill the new product. How do we deal with this change and help the people in our organization become our supporters? Resistance comes from self-protective fear and is an indication the value equation is imbalanced for these people. As leaders catalyzing change, we tend to underestimate the impact and pain caused by the change for everyone else. As humans, we avoid pain unless there’s a good reason to endure it. As change leaders, we’re inflicting pain on others. The value equation is reward – pain = decision. We need to think about how to rebalance the value equation by increasing the reward and minimizing the pain. As a mental metric, list the pain and rewards the change will create, then double the pain and halve the rewards. Then ask yourself, would I still be on board with this? If not, keep increasing the reward and decreasing the pain. You’re asking a group of people to take on personal pain so the organization won’t collapse. We need to balance that by creating opportunities for personal reward, reducing personal pain, involving employees earlier in the discussion, or having a value equation discussion with them upfront. As a change leader, you know that if we don’t change, the organization will be gone in five years and everyone will lose their jobs. However, pain in five years is less impactful than pain in six months. When you ask for change, you’re asking employees to invest in pain now so they don’t have pain later. You may need to make the pain in five years seem scarier and more evident. Decrease the immediate pain. Pain is coming from a place of fear, which you need to address directly. You can do this through peer support, openness, transparency, involving employees in the successes and failures, and building empathy. [21:52] What are tactics for addressing fear? Avoid building a black box—making all the decisions without the employees then dumping the change on them. On the flip side, don’t overburden people who have existing jobs by asking them to attend 400 workshops in 6 months. The biggest risk is people will believe you should just wait it out. They may have heard talks about change over and over and seen it blow over every time. There are several factors and risks related to addressing fear and getting people onboard with change, and there’s no silver bullet. Don’t aim for perfection. Instead, keep several key principles in mind: First, keep the value equation in front of you. You are inflicting pain, so how can you help others through that? Be empathetic. Second, be clear on your change core. A change works through three ripples, and the first is the core. Three questions form your core: Why are we doing this? How will we prove success? What exactly are we doing? Answer the questions in that order. Building this core clearly is how you start to communicate with everyone across your organization. Involve others in discussions about these elements. Explain what you’re anticipating and how it will impact them. Get cohesion on why you’re doing it and how you’ll measure success. Write the answers to the questions on a whiteboard. When you bring people into the discussion early, you minimize some of the resistance because they understand the why and the rewards and they have more hope. Then it’s easy to motivate them, because hope precedes energy, and you can’t motivate someone who doesn’t have internal hope for where they’ll be in the future. [26:33] What are the other ripples? The second ripple is insider change, related to the people involved in delivering the change. Change is hard on them too, not just on the people impacted by it. Monitor the momentum and resistance within the change as well as outside it. When you push through resistance, you create friction, which erodes energy and hope, so you need to be actively stimulating momentum. The third ripple is outsider change, related to the people impacted by the change. This is where you talk about the value equation, connection, peer support networks, etc. As a change leader, prioritize the first ripple, then the second, then the third. Keep all three plates spinning in the air. That’s how you drive value from your change. [29:08] How have you seen change leaders experience personal change as they’re leading change in the organization? You must lead with empathy. Change is a very human process. Successful change isn’t about the mechanics or project management. It’s about the people and bringing them on the journey with you as you drive value and create change. Driving with empathy necessitates a need for personal reflection and growth. You’re asking, how is this valuable? How do I minimize the pain and maximize the reward? The way forward is discussions, empathy, involvement, storytelling, and creating hope before you create energy. Action Guide: Put the information Brendon shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links: Learn more about Valuable Change and sign up for Brendon’s weekly newsletter Check out Brendon’s website Check out Brendon’s book Valuable Change on Amazon Connect with Brendon on LinkedIn Innovation Quote “Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.” – Anaïs Nin 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

Integrating the advantages of large organizations and startups – for product managers Today we are talking about how your organization can more effectively innovate, using precious resources wisely to create new value. We may not talk about your organization by name, but what we will learn together will certainly apply and help you. Joining us is Kapil Kane, the Director of Innovation for Intel China. He is also the founder of GrowthX, a corporate startup accelerator. His experiences have helped him integrate the advantages of large organizations, like Intel, with the scrappiness and agility of startups, and we get to benefit from the insights he’ll share with us. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [1:38] What does your role involve as the Director of Innovation for Intel China? I have three main goals: create and orchestrate one innovation strategy for Intel China, grow and transform our talent and get them skilled in the methodologies of innovation, and bring bottom-up innovation ideas from our employees into the pipeline. Ultimately we want to deliver business growth and people growth. [4:18] How does GrowthX fit into your work? Intel lets our employees have free time to work on their ideas. In the past, we saw many amazing innovations created across China, but we couldn’t get those innovations to land in the market and get commercialized. We wanted to close this gap. We came across startup accelerators that help startups by providing business coaching, lean startup methodologies, and mentors. We decided to create such an accelerator inside Intel, which became GrowthX. We start with a technical proof-of-concept and build and validate a business case through a cohort approach, in which we pick five to six teams and twice a year do 16 weeks of acceleration with eight different sprints, each focusing on different aspect of business. [8:29] What are some practical ways existing organizations can more effectively embrace innovation? What have you seen work, and what should we avoid? Initially we tried to create a centralized innovation center in charge of all innovation initiatives. It didn’t work because the people who created the initiatives didn’t want to lose control of their ideas. Now, different groups do their own ideation activities like hackathons, but we also have some activities for everyone. This year, we’re organizing a giant hackathon for all employees. You need to provide avenues to carry on ideas. Don’t just give someone a certificate after a hackathon and then not let their idea go anywhere. We have programs that give seed funding to ideas from hackathons and self-ideation. We tried accelerating innovation by simply funding ideas that have been incubated and having biweekly checkups to see the progress and guide our employees. We soon realized we needed to bring in more business coaching and methodologies. We brought in external coaches who taught our employees frameworks. We wanted our employees to feel they’re the founders of their ideas. We brought GrowthX outside of Intel and started operating our accelerator out of a coworking space to get innovators to think and act like real entrepreneurs and be completely responsible for moving their ideas forward. For the last four years, once a week all our innovators meet at the accelerator, and the rest of the week they have their day jobs. This year we’re creating the GrowthX Academy, an online platform where any employee can study innovation tools at their own pace, anytime, anywhere. They end up with a business case they can bring to the next level of the program. [16:51] How do employees balance working on their new ideas and working their day jobs? An idea can get an initial seed fund of $5-10 thousand. We allow employees to spend 10-15% of their time developing their idea. They can use the money to hire interns or buy software or anything else they need. They also get technical mentorship from senior tech leaders during incubation. After that, larger projects can get $100-200 thousand, which they can use to hire interns and contract workers who will build their idea. During incubation, employees still work their day jobs. During acceleration, we require employees to spend one full day per week in the accelerator. Again, they can spend funding on interns, contractors, software, etc. Four years ago when we started GrowthX, managers questioned letting their employees spend one day a week on ideas they initiated. Now, managers encourage their employees to join GrowthX. The ideas employees are coming up with must be related to their business unit, and many are customer-inspired, so managers are seeing the value in developing ideas that have strategic alignment with Intel’s goals. [20:23] How do you run GrowthX like a startup? We are very much part of Intel, but we run our accelerator activities at a location physically outside of Intel to force our innovators to spend time outside their day jobs and completely devote their time to advancing their business ideas. [23:59] How do other approaches for increasing innovation capacity, such as Moonshot projects, fit into innovation? There are three kinds of innovation: Sustainable innovation is iterating on a product from one cycle to the next. This is sustainable because you know the product and the market—you’re just making it better. Adjacent innovation is taking an existing product and finding a new application for it in an adjacent market or a different market segment. Breakthrough innovation or moonshots are finding new growth areas to do things you’ve never done before. In a complete innovation strategy, you need all three kinds of innovation. You also need to balance outside-in and inside-out innovation. Outside-in is bringing ideas from outside into your organization, and inside-out is landing ideas from inside your organization outside. Action Guide: Put the information Kapil shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links: Learn more about GrowthX Watch Kapil’s TED Talk about Intrapreneurship Connect with Kapil on LinkedIn Innovation Quote “The ingredient we start with is sand. Everything else is value added by people.” – Andy Bryant, former Chairman of the Board of Intel 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 having an ecosystem strategy Today we are talking about strategy. It’s an important topic because our work as product managers and innovators should be in alignment with our organization’s strategy, but strategy may not be what you think it is. To help us better understand strategy and the large changes taking place in many businesses, Dr. Ron Adner joins us. He is a Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College. Previously he was the Akzo-Nobel Fellow of Strategic Management at INSEAD. His research examines value creation and competition when industry boundaries are changing. His latest book is Winning the Right Game: How to Disrupt, Defend, and Deliver in a Changing World. He has received high praise from his contemporaries, including Clayton Christensen who described his work as “Path-breaking,” and Jim Collins (author of Good to Great) who called him “one of our most important strategic thinkers for the 21st century.” Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:59] Make this simple—what is strategy? Strategy is an indication of what you want to do. A classic test for strategy is, “Do you know what you need to do and what you need to not do?” Strategy is how you allocate your resources and choose which opportunities to forgo while pursuing the ones you’ve chosen. Mainstream strategy includes Porter’s five forces, low cost differentiation, and Clay Christensen’s work on being more sensitive to substitute threats. These tools are based on the problems we had in the 1950’s-1990’s, but the world has changed. It’s getting harder to stretch those frameworks that were built for a world well-defined by industry into the world we face today. Examples of classic disruption like Southwest Airlines relied on new technology, but the industry was the same. Today, the industry is no longer the industry. For example, what is Fintech—insurance, investment, gambling, personal identity? The boundaries around industries are shifting, and that’s why we need a new approach to strategy. [7:35] What are some examples of changes in the business environment that influence strategy development? Take the automotive industry. We used to think of it as Ford vs. GM, and then Toyota started delivering higher quality cars at a lower price, but they were all selling cars. Tesla is different. They’re making electric vehicles, but they’re also making an electric charging infrastructure and servicing vehicles with over-the-air updates. They’re the dealer, fuel provider, and service station. Now the buzzword isn’t industry; it’s ecosystem. The clean boundaries of knowing who is doing what have broken down. A hundred and twenty years ago, autos were an ecosystem. People were trying to figure out who would make cars, pave the roads, and provide fuel. As those relationships became stable and accepted, we conceptualized the auto world as industries. Now we’re moving back into an ecosystem mode—rewiring and reconfiguring. The challenge for strategy today is we’re transitioning from the stable configuration of industry into a new reconfiguration of ecosystem. All the old tools in our toolbox were built for a world of industries and break down in this world of ecosystems. [10:55] How has the perspective of business model innovation impacted the ecosystem perspective? An ecosystem is the structure through which partners interact to deliver their value proposition. It’s anchored in value proposition, and you have a multiplicity of partners that need to be aligned relative to one another in a certain structure. An ecosystem strategy looks at that configuration and how you get partners into that alignment. The business model is a company-centric view of how to make money. The challenge with business models is you can overlook what it takes to get partners in place and willing to participate in your vision. If you don’t have a business model that makes sense for your partners too, you’ll be disappointed with the lack of alignment and inability to deliver. [13:24] Have you seen dependencies on partners changing over time? Today we see partners taking different roles. In the automotive supply chain, there’s a huge amount of interdependence, but the structure of the interdependence has been stable. We knew who’s making the car seat, and they ship it to the assembler then to the dealer. Today we’re seeing reconfiguration. The people making the car seat might want to gather data about the customer. We’ve always had interdependence, but today technology makes it easier to pull things together in new ways. Even small organizations are participating in reconfiguration. As a product manager making one block, you should be thinking about what happens outside that block. A company with an ecosystem strategy has a wide lens perspective on doing a great job on their piece and knowing how other pieces come together. [16:10] What does the title of your book Winning the Right Game mean? It’s a subtle play off the book Winning by Jack Welch, CEO of General Electric. If you wanted to be in GE, you had to win—by being the best in your industry. It was very clear what game you were playing—for example, making ovens. Winning the Right Game suggests there are multiple games being played today on the same game board. Amazon is making smart ovens that do something different from GE’s ovens. There are multiple games in what used to be a well-defined space. The title is also supposed to evoke fear—you might be winning the wrong game, which feels an awful lot like losing. That’s why we need a new approach to strategy. [18:08] What’s an example of winning the wrong game? Kodak is the perfect example. You’ve probably heard this story wrong, that they died because of inertia and clinging to their own ways. Actually, they did have a hard time accepting digital cameras until 2000, but then they went through an incredible corporate transformation and bet their company on being the next great digital printing company. They succeeded and became the number-one seller of digital cameras in the US and the number-four seller of inkjet printers in the world. However, digital printing became irrelevant because of digital viewing. Inertia didn’t kill Kodak; the iPhone did. People didn’t need to print pictures anymore. Kodak won the digital printing game, but that was the wrong game. The Kodak story also raises the question, how did so many people get their story wrong? We’ve been told they died because of lazy management, but they were neither lazy nor unsuccessful in what they were trying to do. People misdiagnosed their problem because the tools we have are focused on what’s happening within an industry. They think if a giant falls it must be because they didn’t embrace new technology. Transitions aren’t just about technology. They’re about changing the boundaries across industries. A phone could never be a printer, but a phone with a screen can undermine the need for a printer. We need new tools, frameworks, and concepts to be able to see ecosystem disruption coming in the future. [21:53] What tools can we use to think about strategy in this ecosystem environment? From the Kodak story, there are two key tools that can help us see ecosystem disruption coming. First is value architecture, which is thinking about your value proposition in value-based terms. For example, first we capture the image, then we produce, view, and share the image. Value architecture is a framework for creating value-based categories to pressure-test the impact of technological change. Once you have these categories, you can look at phones getting better and see how they can impact how photos are viewed. Ecosystem disruption happens when change is running across categories rather than changing the technology within a category. Value architecture starts with calling out how you’re framing the problem you’re solving. From there, you can begin to see a new set of interactions. The second tool is value inversion. In competition, we have two different kinds of relationships: As rivals and substitutes get better, you are worse off. As complementors get better, you are better off. Value inversion says complementary relationships aren’t necessarily permanent. Some complements will always benefit you as they get better. For example, if you’re Kodak and bet on being a digital printing company, improvements in the photo-processing chips inside cameras are always good for you. Other complements are maturing, such as photo sensors. As pixel density increases, pictures get better and people want to print more pictures, but once you get to 20 or 40 megapixels, the difference doesn’t matter. Value inversion is concerned with the third kind of complements, which can get too good. For example, having a screen on the back of a camera was initially good because it helped people take better pictures that they wanted to print, but as the screen becomes better, suddenly there’s no difference between looking at a picture on paper and looking at it on the screen. Now that complement has become a substitute. A competitive threat can come from someone who started off as a helpful partner. If you’re only looking within an industry boundary, you won’t see this dynamic, so to innovate you need to know how to track these dynamics to be more effective in offense and defense. Action Guide: Put the information Ron shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links: Visit Ron’s website and get the first chapters of his books for free Check out Ron’s book Winning Right Innovation Quotes “You cannot make sense of things you cannot describe.” – Malcom Gladwell “Your people cannot make sense of your strategy if they can’t describe it.” – Ron Adner 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

Reflecting on your passion and purpose – for product managers Today I’m inviting you on a reflective journey of discovery—a journey to consider your why—which I call your purpose. I revisited this myself a few years ago and found more deeply understanding my why was personally inspiring and provided clarity to me for how I should spend my time. To help us, we have the why expert with us, Frankie Russo. Through his Russo Capital firm, he has developed a portfolio of companies across multiple industries, including technology, advertising, marketing, automotive, music, agriculture, publishing, and finance. He believes your why is important to your success and how you think about success. He has written about these concepts in two books, first The Art of WHY (2016), and just recently, his second book Breaking WHY: Hacking and Rebuilding Strategic Emotions for Authentic Success. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [02:02] What does our why mean? Why is our purpose in what we do and how we do it. It taps into our passion. Passion and purpose coming together create profits, which can go beyond money to include a changed life, more time available for yourself, or an experience. It’s a challenge to hack and rebuild your current life while you’re in the middle of it. You can apply the principles I’m about to share to start something great or get unstuck as a product manager or in your personal life. [5:00] What are the benefits of having a clear why? The greatest benefit is getting to a place where you’re at peace with yourself—being happier and more joyful and having a sense of freedom. These benefits inspire me to continue to work on why. You’ll have some early wins, but for your work to pay off, you have to be willing to continue. [7:52] What are the steps to uncovering our true why? [8:10] Step One: Break your Why Figure out what your why is now and how it’s different today from what it used to be. Ask, why am I here in this moment and in this section of my life, and why am I here on this earth? What’s my mission? What am I doing to fulfill that mission? Sometimes we do our passion and look for profits but lose our purpose; or we do our purpose and get profits but aren’t passionate about it. You need to put together the fire from the passion and the meaningfulness from the purpose to create profits that are worth it and have deeper fulfillment. [19:38] Step Two: Count the Cost Figure out what your why is going to cost. Make a plan. I’ve learned to count the cost the hard way—I tried doing my passion and purpose many times and failed because I didn’t plan. If the cost is greater than the why, go back to step one. Go through the process until your why is strong enough and motivating enough that you’re committed to go to the next step. [20:18] Step Three: Commit and Believe Sign a contract with yourself. Make sure you’re fully committed and believe the why is greater than the cost. For the rest of the 10 steps, check out the resources below. [21:56] What do you mean by breaking your why? I had a personal journey with breaking why. In between writing my two books, I got a divorce and hit my emotional bottom. It made me a person who’s willing to be honest to himself and everyone around. Sometimes I have to break free from what I have been doing to appease others. Helping and loving others is not the same thing as pleasing and appeasing others, but I thought they were the same thing for a long time. I use the words hacking, rebuilding, and breaking because those are the focal points in my journey and my book. Sometimes you have to break a relationship to become your authentic self. Unless something dies, it can’t be reborn. What I do today is what I am. Action Guide: Put the information Frankie shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links: Check out Frankie’s website Learn about the School of Why Get a free copy of the School of Why Workbook Check out Frankie’s books Breaking WHY and The Art of Why Innovation Quote “Don’t flinch.” – Frankie Russo 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

Special Episode From the 2020 Summit   This is a special podcast episode, sharing an important discussion from The Everyday Innovator 2020 Summit. The Summit brought together 24 experts who spoke on topics for product managers and product VPs. Many of the topics are truly timeless and this speaker, Keith Hawk, impressed the Product VPs who attended with his sales and organizational leadership experience. As this was a Summit presentation, the format of the show notes below are a bit different.   BIO: Keith Hawk is a lifelong sales professional who has spent most of his career in senior sales leadership roles, most notably his 10+ years as the Senior VP of Sales for a 1,000+ sales force in a major information company, LexisNexis. He is a frequent speaker on topics including consultative selling, leadership, principled negotiations, incentive compensation plans, and performance metrics. He is the co-author of the popular business book, GET-REAL SELLING. Keith and his son AJ Hawk, 11-year NFL linebacker and Super Bowl champion, do frequent corporate speaking engagements together on “The Athletic Organization”, where they mix Keith’s career as a Fortune 500 senior leader with AJ’s experiences in the wild world of NFL football. Keith and his son Ryan Hawk, host of the internationally popular podcast “The Learning Leader”, do presentations together on the importance of principled leadership and building a culture of thriving in organizations. INSIGHT: The most important attribute for a professional salesperson is confidence. One of the keys to being able to confidently advocate for our business, or our product, is to be inspired by what an amazing job our product can do for our customer.   Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:08] To what do you attribute your success mentoring others? People look at who you are before they look at what you’ve done, so first I try to be a good teammate. Integrity and confidence in our shared mission are important. I make sure everybody understands their role, and I stay involved at the front of the operation. If you’re a leader, don’t forget what the other people in your organization do.   [3:56] How does emotional intelligence help you be a great leader? Emotional intelligence means self-awareness and understanding how you’re perceived. Every leader should work on building their emotional intelligence. You can do that by listening to mentors whom you trust and watching the reactions of people around you.   [9:11] To help us improve the relationship between product and sales, what do we need to know about what motivates a sales VP? VP of sales is the most measurable job in a company. We are measured on our numbers, and our sales force is paid based on their performance. As VPs of sales, we want to be successful. Sales is very misunderstood. Consumers tend to perceive salespersons negatively. Professional selling in a business-to-business setting is not what it is in the consumer world. My mission is to help my sales professionals become supremely confident that they work for a great company that delivers great products that solve customers’ problems. Our job is to provide confidence to customers and increase their success. Sales also can give valuable information to product management, because we talk with customers every day. Some of the greatest learning happens when we bring customers and product people together.   [14:57] Do you think the mission of providing confidence to customers is a common perspective among salespeople? Unfortunately, too many salespeople bag-dive—figuratively dive into a bag of products and throw them at the customer. Salespeople easily forget that they can only be successful after making their customer successful through the use of their product. When salespeople believe that success comes through mass-manufacturing proposals and hoping some customers say yes, they propagate the stereotype that salespeople don’t care about their customers. I propagate the perspective that it is our life’s mission, not just our job, to make other people more successful.   [20:19] What are the responsibilities of a sales VP? It’s a pretty broad role. I care most about who’s on my team–recruiting, hiring, training, developing great professionals. Another part is sales operations, the infrastructure, which concerns how people get paid. Organizing the many different people on the team is important. I’m constantly planning sales campaigns and sales territories. A big part of the job is having your mission clear, and then executing the details to accomplish that mission. A sales VP is not just the sales leader to the salespeople; they’re also the representative of the sales organization to the rest of the company and outside the company.   [26:01] How can product and sales get on the same page? Sometimes product management offers the sales team a SPIF—a one-time payment to incentivize sales to get attention for an individual product. This approach can backfire because it doesn’t encourage the company to work together as a system. Senior leadership must plan to ensure the organization is working together, rather than being motivated only by individual products.   [30:27] How can we resolve tensions between product and salespeople? Getting people in the same room, sharing a conversation and getting to know each other can go miles toward building trust. Problems always center on trust. It’s important to think about where a product person can add value. A customer review meeting is a great opportunity for product and sales to work together. We meet with the customer and ask, “What are they buying from us? Why are they buying this product? What is it doing for them? And why are they buying it from us?” These meetings provide rich insights into the needs of the customer, and allow the salespeople and product people to work together to meet those needs.   [36:46] Bonus Question: How can a product VP communicate their willingness to work together with sales? It would make my day if a product VP told me about someone in my sales organization digging deep and pulling product knowledge from them that can make their lives better. That would make me feel good because salespeople need to understand that they’re not solo contributors. People who use the skills and knowledge of others in the organization are more successful. Another thing that would make my day is if a product leader invited me to plan with them. We can be more successful by understanding each other’s goals and figuring out how we can work together to accomplish something more powerful. Action Guide: Put the information Keith shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide.     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 launching products Today we are talking about go-to-market planning and what is involved in planning the launch of products. Helping us learn about this is Karthik Suresh. He is a technology product leader who has led teams as founder, early hire, and executive at companies including Facebook, Craft.co, and KCG holdings. He studied computer science at Carnegie Mellon and business at the London Business School. Now, he is the co-founder of Ignition, which has helped organizations launch more than 200 products. Ignition is the world’s first go-to-market platform for managing all stages of the product life cycle. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [1:50] Can you share a story about getting a product to market? My last role at Facebook was as a product manager in the Facebook Reality Labs, which is now Meta. The go-to-market (GTM) process involves many different teams, including engineering, product, marketing, and management. We worked with teams across Facebook to launch the product. It was a huge, highly cross-collaborative process with many stakeholders. We managed it out of one giant spreadsheet about target persona, messaging, positioning, etc. A bunch of people from different teams collaborated by getting together and talking about what we had gotten done. We had a huge launch checklist with all the things we had to do before launch, like promotion, design, copywriting, budget for campaigns, approval from leaders, and legal. It was one of the hugest, most cross-functional processes I’ve been through, and it was surprising that everything was managed through one spreadsheet. Six months later, we had another launch with a new product marketing manager who did it differently. We had to learn everything again. It was a highly fragmented process, with assets and copies delivered in various different ways. Eighty percent of the time, product marketing managers are managing stakeholders rather than planning the launch. [9:48] What factors contribute to failures in launching products? One of the biggest issues is not having a strategic planning process for go-to-market. Companies dedicate most of their resources to engineering and product development and very little to messaging about their value propositions. Sending an email to customers is not a launch. You need a multichannel approach to reach your target users. Another reason is lack of experience. Company founders tend to be product managers or engineers who value product and engineering over marketing. Many product marketing managers don’t have previous experience doing launches at a large scale. Your go-to-market process should be tiered. Spend the first tier planning as a team, setting objectives, thinking about the target audience, talking to users, and figuring out messaging and positioning channels. You need to communicate your value proposition to your customers. Product managers talk a lot to users, but marketing doesn’t have that experience, so they often copy everything from the product specs and make that the launch. That doesn’t work because it needs to be a completely different process. You also need to know what marketing objective you’re going after and have a game plan for each objective. If you’re trying to get customers to switch to your product from a competitor or you’re trying to grow your category, you could invest in SEO. But if you’re creating a new category, don’t invest in SEO because people aren’t searching for it yet—instead, invest in content generation. Another problem is being rushed. Marketing teams and engineering teams rarely communicate about delays. There’s a problem with coordinating timing. [15:54] What elements should be part of go-to-market planning? At the macro level, go-to-market includes the company-level GTM strategy set by the executives. The micro level is a plan for the specific product and features. First, you need a tiered process in place to put your launch in the correct tier depending on whether you’re launching an entirely new product or enhancing an existing product with a small feature. Then follow these steps: Have clear business and marketing objectives and KPIs. Figure out who your target audience is. Have a clear idea of your ideal customer profile. Determine how to position your products to differentiate from competitors. Create copy to communicate your value proposition to your target audience. Have a 40-character message that pitches the value proposition and top three features. Clearly define the messaging strategy. Choose which channels to use to get your messaging to your users. Put together campaigns for each channel. Check everything on your launch checklist. Communicate with engineers and other stakeholders to make sure everything is ready. Align all your stakeholders before launch day. Get approval from leadership and resolve conflicts. Post-launch, take clear measurements and run a retrospective survey. [23:33] What kind of testing do you do to validate your messaging? Before starting messaging, talk to as many users as you can and record insights. Use qualitative and quantitative data. Test different messages. You could run Google search ads with different messages and see which has the highest click-through rate. [24:53] What differences have you seen in go-to-market processes based on the scale of the organization? Early-stage startups have less expertise and fewer resources. They need to balance their speed of execution and strategic planning, which is a huge cost for early startups to invest in. The biggest mistake I’ve seen is companies investing in SEO when they’re creating a new category. Late-stage companies have huge go-to-market teams and lots of experience, but they need to make sure all the stakeholders are aligned. Getting approval for copy, assets, plans, etc., can be an issue. Product managers have very different jobs in early-stage startups compared to in late-stage companies. Product managers in established companies have many resources, so most of their time is spent on stakeholder alignment—reaching out to partner teams, figuring out the roadmap, and removing roadblocks for engineers. In early-stage companies, PMs have no resources. They’re doing user research, analyzing data, and figuring out product-market fit. There’s little issue with stakeholder alignment; the main challenge is hustling to deliver results with very limited resources. Action Guide: Put the information Karthik shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links: Learn more about the Ignition GTM Platform Connect with Karthik on LinkedIn or Twitter Innovation Quote “If you have always done it that way, it is probably wrong.” – Charles Kettering 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 value-based pricing Today we are talking about product pricing, specifically the best practices for pricing B2B software products. Joining us is Chris Mele, who has spent his 25+ year career in software products, with much of that time as a pricing specialist. He is the Managing Partner at Software Pricing Partners, which focuses on helping software companies develop better pricing strategies. The company has helped IBM, Dell, Cisco, HP, McAfee, Microsoft, and others. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [6:11] Who owns pricing? Pricing has suffered from the idea that it’s an attribute that can be decided two weeks before launch. That’s a dangerous proposition that causes a lot of great products to fail to meet their revenue objectives. Who owns pricing is one of the most important discussions you’ll ever have. With software, you can get a new version tomorrow with groundbreaking features and capabilities that deliver enormous value. Product managers are at the heart of the product’s new capabilities, so they have perspective on the value of the product. They have the thumbprint of the customer and know what value customers get out of the product. Your pricing strategy needs to address the broad array of customers you serve. Pricing is rapidly becoming a discipline and a science, and people are using pretty sophisticated tools to approach perspectives on pricing. [11:18] Can you give us some examples of products you’ve helped price? Everything Software Pricing Partners has done is B2B software. I want to tell the story of Black Monday, the recession prior to the Reagan years. Back then, there was no Cloud, so you shipped software on-premise. Software Pricing Partners invented financial overlays, which is selling software as a subscription. There was no way for two people to use a single software license at a time, so companies were sure to be paid fairly for the licenses. However, some companies realized they could pass a license out on a network. Out of that came the Concurrent User Model, a monetization approach to sell network licenses and charge based on the number in use at one time. Value pricing is often confused with charging what each customer will pay, so if you and I bought the same thing we’re paying wildly different prices. That’s the opposite of transparency and creates a lot of problems in defending your value. Value-based pricing requires market fairness and transparency, keeping the net price calculation the same for all your customers. Many of the techniques from B2C don’t work in B2B at all. [18:41] What are the factors involved in pricing? There are three pillars of intellectual property: Licensing—the licensing metric describes the range of deals the sales team might be making. Choosing the correct units to sell is one of the most important decisions you’ll ever make—for example, you don’t want your smallest product to be a $1 million list, while your competitor has a $20,000 list, but you also don’t want to charge a flat fee so your customers can do anything with just one site license, because then they won’t upgrade. Offering Model—When you’re monetizing intellectual property, you’re monetizing capabilities. The Offering Model is describing your ideal B2B customers and usage patterns, how they use your product and extract value, and how they pass on value to their customers. Understanding the value chain and the similarities between different types of customers helps you keep your packaging and sales dialogue simple. Pricing—Be able to take in a wide variety of data and get it cleaned and structured to make pricing decisions. Willingness to pay requires a context, and you must have a dialogue with your customers to understand their context and do a deep dive to determine if you left money on the table. You need to be able to pass your business on to a new owner someday and say confidently, “When I make these kinds of changes, I have these kinds of responses.” Make a reliable forecast, exercise market fairness, and validate your hypotheses constantly. Action Guide: Put the information Chris shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links: Learn more about Software Pricing Partners Connect with Chris on LinkedIn Innovation Quote “You have to have a perspective on your value.” – Chris Mele 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