Product Mastery Now for Product Managers, Leaders, and Innovators

Trends influencing the future of leadership – for product managers Today we are talking about what product managers should know about the future of leadership. By the nature of the role, product managers are leaders, as they must influence others, and many product managers will be in senior leadership roles in the future. Consequently, we should be looking at what it takes to be an effective leader now and in the future. Joining us is an expert who tracks the trends influencing the future of leadership—Anne Loehr. She is a leadership speaker, trainer, and coach, and  frequently writes on leadership topics. Her journey into leadership began as she owned and managed hotels and safari companies in Kenya, dealing with many crisis management situations, including facing down lions, severe weather and floods that carried away equipment, and transforming employees from different tribes to succeed together. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:01] What are the big trends that are driving leadership change? There are four big trends: Longevity–our workforce is aging. The chances my sixteen-year-old daughter will live to 100 are very good, and the chances of her being healthy at 100 are even better. The idea of retiring at 65 is going to be thrown out the window, because we’ll have employees who are 70 or 75 who are vital and want to contribute. As leaders, we’re thinking through what it’s like to manage an aging workforce. People, especially women, are leaving businesses in droves to start their own businesses. There are 1900 small businesses started every day in the US. How do we support or retain people who want to start their own businesses? Diversity—our leaders are becoming more diverse and younger. Freelancers—by 2027, 50% of the workforce will be freelancers. [9:48] What does current leadership look like? Every organization and industry looks different. Some organizations have the culture of startups while others are based on command and control. Our whole society is asking, how do we respond to change? We need emotional intelligence, which means using our emotions to ground ourselves, show up fully, and influence those around us. Some people respond to change by holding even tighter to command and control, while others are disengaging, as we’ve seen in the Great Resignation. [12:47] As leaders, how do we encourage employees to be engaged and move into the future? Employee engagement means employees are psychologically committed to making a positive contribution at work. Globally, 20% of employees are engaged, and the US rate is around 40%. There are four elements of emotional intelligence: Self-awareness Self-management Social awareness Influence We need leaders who: have purpose engage others inspire others Culture is made of behavior, mindset, and values. If we have a sense of mission and values, and we know what behaviors are expected, we can be inspired to show up better tomorrow. [16:30] How can leaders communicate what’s expected of the team? The leaders of the future must have a strong handle on non-technical competencies, such as coaching, conflict management, and emotional intelligence. Practice these competencies in your organization and use them to influence the organization culture. [20:28] What can product managers take action on to become better leaders in this new leadership environment? Let’s break down coaching. It’s made of two skills—active listening and asking questions. Product managers make good coaches because they’re used to asking questions. Ask open-ended questions that start with how or what and are short (8 words or less). Use forward-focused, chronological language—avoid getting stuck in the drama; focus on what you’re doing in the future. Accountability partners help us change. You can have an external, formal accountability partner whom you talk about goals with. You can have an internal, formal accountability partner—a peer or colleague. Tell them you’re working on not interrupting, being more concise, etc., and ask them to let you know how you’re doing. Or you can have an internal, informal accountability partner. Action Guide: Put the information Anne shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links: Learn more about the Center for Human Capital Innovation Check out Anne’s website Innovation Quote “We need to accept that we won’t always make the right decisions, that we’ll screw up royally sometimes – understanding that failure is not the opposite of success, it’s part of success.” – Arianna Huffington 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 move their customers to action using the StoryBrand Framework Today we are talking about how to clearly communicate the value of a product to customers. Specifically, we will learn about a 7-part framework for marketing communications. Joining us is Dr. J.J. Peterson, whose PhD is specifically about the validity and effectiveness of this framework, which has been used by tens of thousands of organizations. He is also the Chief of Teaching and Facilitation at StoryBrand, a Nashville-based company that helps organizations across the globe clarify their messages so their organizations will grow. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:51] On the StoryBrand website, you say “Even if you have the best product in the marketplace, you will lose to a competitor’s inferior product if they communicate more clearly.” How does the StoryBrand Framework help with this and why does it work so well? It makes me really angry when people put time and energy into creating great products that never get to people. We’re under this myth that if we build it they will come. In reality, a competitor with an inferior product who communicates more clearly will beat you. Period. That’s not an excuse to not have great products—when you have a great product that solves a customer problem and makes people’s lives better, you need to communicate quickly and clearly in a way that invites people into a beautiful story to do business. Our brains are designed to keep us alive by looking for information that helps us survive and thrive and conserving thinking calories. If you’re communicating anything that doesn’t contribute to survival and thriving, or if it’s confusing or overwhelming, people’s bodies are designed to tune you out. Most of us daydream about 30% of our day, as a survival mechanism, but when we watch a movie or read a book, it does the daydreaming for us and helps us make sense of the story and of life. Stories help us focus on important information and give us a formulaic way of thinking. The people selling inferior products are able to do it because they communicate in such a way that customers know how the product will help them survive and thrive and can immediately make a decision. [10:44] Take us through the StoryBrand Framework. Every good story has seven elements or plot points. These rules go back to Aristotle and Plato, who argued that if you want to move society to action, the best way to do it is through story. Studies have shown that the better the story (meaning the better it follows the rules), the more likely someone will see themselves in the story—that’s called narrative transportation. When an audience experiences narrative transportation, they are more likely to be moved to action. Here are the seven elements: Character want—we need to clearly know early in the story what the hero wants Problem—something gets in the way of what the character wants Guide—someone with empathy and authority who helps the hero solve the problem Plan—the guide gives the hero a clear, simple path to win Call to action—a moment when the hero must be in or out; often there’s a timer that limits how much time they have to act Failure—we know how this story can end in tragedy Success—we know what success would look like We summarize this as: A Character has a Problem and meets a Guide who gives them a Plan and calls them to Action that helps them avoid Failure and ends in Success. [17:48] How do we apply these story elements to marketing? Position your customer as the hero of the story and your product or business as the guide. If you make your product the hero, and the customer is also positioning themselves as the hero, you’re in competing stories. This communication framework works for marketing and internal communication, like motivating people around a new project. Even if you don’t do marketing, you’re always communicating with people and trying to move them to action. Understanding that everybody you talk to views themselves as a hero in their own story will radically change the way you communicate to them, allow you to approach things differently, and get better results. [21:47] Take us through an example of using the StoryBrand Framework. Suppose we’re creating a podcast microphone. Character want: Identify what your customer wants—Our customers want a microphone that will give them high quality recordings. Problem: Most high quality microphones are not portable and don’t easily plug in to laptops. If you just list your features, you won’t win in the market. If you state what problem you solve, you will win. Identify how the problem makes people feel—People feel frustrated and ripped off because they can’t get what they want out of their microphone. Guide: As a podcaster I have been frustrated by the microphones I’ve been given, so I created a microphone that will work anywhere and makes you sound great. Plan: State the plan for your customer to win: (1) We made the microphone small and compact so it can go in your carry-on easily. (2) We give you an adapter so it can plug into any computer. (3) We give you a lifetime guarantee so you’ll never have to buy another microphone. Call to action: Buy now before tomorrow night so you can get the lifetime guarantee for free. Failure: You can stop being frustrated by the low-quality recording equipment other people are offering you… Success: …and instead you can have a microphone that makes you sound good and you can take anywhere. You can put all of this into an explanatory paragraph on a website, an intro of a speech to investors, or a sales pitch: “I know you’re an investor who is looking for a high-quality mic you can take anywhere with you. The problem is so many mics these days don’t deliver on that promise—they’re clunky and hard to plug into your computer, which I’m sure is incredibly frustrating and makes you feel like you’re getting ripped off when you buy equipment that doesn’t work the way you want. You really deserve a microphone that you can use the best way possible. I get it. I’ve done a ton of podcasts, and it makes me so angry when I’ve done a great podcast and it sounds so bad, it makes me sound cheap—which is why I became part of this product launch to create a microphone and get it out to the public. People all over the world are using it right now to make themselves sound better. Here’s how this microphone is different: We made it small so you can take it anywhere very easily, including in a carry-on. We give you an adapter so you can plug it into any computer. And you have a lifetime guarantee so you’re never going to have to buy another microphone again. Right now we have a special going on, so if you buy now, that lifetime guarantee costs you nothing, but it’s only for another 24 hours. Once you get this microphone, you’re going to stop being frustrated by sounding cheap and not great on podcasts, and instead you’re going to be able to take that microphone wherever you want, save time and money by not having to go into a podcast studio, and sound fantastic. Do you want that microphone?” [27:59] How can we apply the StoryBrand Framework to internal communication? If I’m a team manager, my team is the hero. I could communicate to them like this: Character want: We want to dominate the market. Problem: The market is saturated, and it’s really hard to differentiate. I know we have a better product, but this makes us feel frustrated. Guide: I totally get it. I’ve been on product launches where we knew were going to win but it just fell flat. But guess what? I found this marketing framework that will help us win in this. Plan: Here’s how we do it: First, we have to understand how story really works. Second, we need to identify the elements of our story that help position our customer as the hero and us as a guide. Third, we need to take that language and put it everywhere. Call to action: We’re going to have a private workshop with this company called StoryBrand. Failure: We’re going to stop being frustrated with losing to people worse than us in the marketplace. Success: Instead, we’re going to dominate with the best product because we know we have what it takes. [31:11] How can product managers get started with the StoryBrand Framework? First, start thinking about what problem you solve for your customer. That’s the most important communication piece. When you stop talking about your customers’ problem, your customers lose interest, because they don’t think the story is about them. Constantly talk about the problem you solve. Action Guide: Put the information J.J. shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links: Listen to J.J.’s Marketing Made Simple podcast Check out Donald Miller’s book Building a StoryBrand Check out J.J.’s and Donald Miller’s book Marketing Made Simple Create a Brand Script Innovation Quote “No great story has ever been written by someone who plays the victim.” – Don Miller 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

Using an Innovation Stage-Gate – for product managers Today we are talking about how Lean Startup can be used at large organizations. To tackle this topic, Jim Euchner is joining us. He has helped many large companies implement innovation practices including Lean Startup and has written the book on the topic, titled Lean Startup in Large Organizations. He has served in executive positions, responsible for innovation, at several large organizations and is the co-founder of the MIT Innovation Laboratory.  Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [1:13] What are the key principles of Lean Startup? Principles related to how you innovate: Lean Learning Loop—a business experiment to test a hypothesis Pivot or Persist Decision—using the experiment to validate or invalidate a hypothesis Minimum Viable Product—minimum prototype used in the experiment or as an early product Principles related to what you’re trying to learn: Innovation Accounting—keeping track of your learning agenda Value Hypothesis—how you create value for customers Business Model Hypothesis—how you capture value for yourself Growth Hypothesis—how you scale [8:22] Why do large organizations struggle with adopting Lean Startup? It’s hard because large organizations are innovating inside a context. There’s an impedance mismatch between the startup principles and what needs to happen in the core business. I use the phrase “Yes, and…” Yes, you need to use Lean Startup principles and do things to make them work in the corporate environment. For example, the lean learning loop, business experiment, and pivot decision can seem very chaotic for an organization that’s used to a traditional stage-gate process. They’re not used to going wherever the customer tells them to go. To contain the chaos, use an innovation stage-gate. Use Lean Startup practices and be as Agile as you need to be in each learning phase—the customer value preposition, the business model, and the model to scale. At the end of each stage, have a deliverable that’s reviewable so people can decide to proceed or not. While a traditional stage-gate is successive refinement, an innovation stage-gate is successive elaboration. Similarly, a minimum viable product gets a negative reaction in IT and engineering departments, because they’re afraid you’re going to take a product to market that’s not sustainable. In this case, use graduated engagement. You have free rein to build prototypes until you get to incubation, but during incubation you’ll take care of all the issues engineering raised. Practices like these make existing functions work constructively with the innovation team. Some large companies have a separate innovation lab, but the challenge with separating innovation is you’re throwing away your advantage of being a big company. [13:08] What other antibodies against innovation have you seen in large organizations, and how can we deal with them? Other hypotheses core to Lean Startup like the value hypothesis, the business hypothesis, and the growth hypothesis trigger reactions at an even deeper level. Following the customer can take you places the company is not sure it wants to go. Be very clear about the opportunity space you want to operate in and the assets you want to leverage. People may worry you’ll cannibalize the core business. Develop a business model with a keen awareness of measuring its impact on the core business. Often, this will help both your new business and your core business. When your new business is growing, separate incubation from the core business and explicitly negotiate arrangements with the core business, so you’re both independent and connected. When you’re making decisions, be open—people are sometimes so afraid they’re going to get squashed they hoard information. Be flexible. Be empathetic—people resist innovation because they have good reasons, and if you can understand their reasons and have good relationships, you can find ways to move forward. [17:53] What steps can large companies take to get started with Lean Startup? Apply the whole system, not just a single piece. Sometimes people pull out the minimum viable product and use that but don’t do any experiments—that’s just prototype, not a minimum viable product. Adhere to the underlying principles—learn and learn fast. Often, product managers are creating new products, not entire business models. In this case, use Lean Startup principles like the Lean learning loop and minimum viable prototype, and try to shift your conversation toward learning from customers. People are often worried to use Lean Startup, because they think their product will never meet safety requirements, but they’re worrying about this before they even have a fully formed value proposition. Engineers are good at solving those problems, and customers are good at raising them. Defer decisions like these to appropriate times in the process, and keep customer discovery first. If people aren’t getting out of their office and testing their prototypes with customers, they’re missing the whole point. Use experiments with customers during design to learn from them. Do things quickly—don’t build the most elaborate prototype. Keep track of your experiments, and confront the data. If customers really don’t want something, you have to admit that to yourself. [22:49] Tell us more about how innovation stage-gate works? The first stage of innovation is scoping or customer discovery. Large companies can apply Lean Startup easily for this stage. The second stage of the innovation gate is creating a business model when you’re developing a product that is different from the core company or you’re starting a new business. This is an even more challenging innovation process and has its own antibodies. The third stage is incubation, which is in market. The objective is to learn and understand your assumptions about the business, its potential for profitability, and how you’re going to scale. If you’re developing a product for your current customers, sold through your current channels, with your current business model, then Lean Startup practices are used upfront. However, if you’re trying to create an entirely new business, you need all aspects of the innovation stage-gate. [26:30] How can we manage a portfolio of experiments and products? You need dedicated resources. Look at your opportunity spaces and initiatives as a portfolio, and have an innovation steering group that looks at decisions about which platforms to pursue. Have periodic portfolio reviews. If you see an opportunity space in an area, place bets and see which ones pay out. As a large company, stay tied into the startup community. You may find someone who has a solution that will work with your vision. Action Guide: Put the information Jim shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links: Order Jim’s book, Lean Startup in Large Organizations, on Amazon (released on February 23, 2022) Visit Jim’s Lean Startup website Check out more resources from Jim’s website Read the Research-Technology Management Journal Innovation Quote “It’s not what we don’t know that gets us into trouble. It’s what we do know that just ain’t so.” – Will Rogers Thanks! Thank you for taking the journey to product mastery and learning with me from the successes and failures of product innovators, managers, and developers. If you enjoyed the discussion, help out a fellow product manager by sharing it using the social media buttons you see below. Source

A bicycle company and innovation excellence – for product managers Today we are talking about transforming a struggling company to excellence by applying product management disciplines, including R&D principles, innovation process, and more. We’re discussing a business novel that shares these topics in an engaging and practical way, titled Winning Innovation: How innovation excellence propels an industry icon toward sustained prosperity. Joining us to discuss the transformation to excellence is Norbert Majerus, co-author of the novel and returning guest on this podcast. He joined us previously in episode 212, discussing Lean-driven innovation for product managers. Norbert spent 40 years at Goodyear, driving R&D and innovation excellence. Now he is a keynote speaker, teacher, and consultant, sharing his expertise with others. I appreciate him sharing some of it with us. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [1:50] Why did you write a novel about innovation? When I give workshops, people love my stories. I wondered how I could get a message about innovation across just by telling stories. It dawned on me it had to be a novel. [5:36] Tell us about the bicycle company in your novel. The company is the best at what they do. They have the best product on the market, their bikes win races, and they’re very expensive. However, the technology is old and competition has caught up to them. The owner talks to a friend who brings in innovation excellence and transforms the company. He tells the owner, “You are the best at what you do, but it’s not sustainable on its own. I will teach you to use your innovative thinking and continue being the best at what you do and how you do it.” The company struggles with innovating and changing, but if they wait another year or two, it will be too late. They need to look at what they’re doing well and engage all the people in the company to use their creativity and reinvent the company. Of course the book has a happy ending, and I don’t believe that’s fiction. This is such a simple process that everyone can be successful. [10:50] What’s the first step to becoming more innovative? Constantly thinking about how you can do better should be in your DNA. Most companies do product innovation well, but you also need to be innovative in how you work. I used to think innovation was all about following a process, but now I know you have to engage people in transformation. If you don’t, the transformation won’t be sustainable. It’s also a lot easier to teach innovation excellence to experts already in your company, rather than bringing in innovation experts and teaching them about your company. Change the culture while you engage the people, and engage them while you change the process. Don’t just tell people what the new process is. Educate them in new thinking, and then develop the process together. Doing this takes upfront effort, but it’s much more sustainable and gives better results. [15:50] What do you do if people in your company don’t recognize the importance of changing? In the book, one of the characters is me as a young engineer. I come into the company with all these great ideas, and the leaders tell me they don’t need that stuff. They think they know what they’re doing. If you know you’re on a burning platform and are going to go out of business if you don’t do something drastic, it’s easy to engage people, but if they don’t recognize that, it’s harder. People need motivation to change. When I was at Goodyear, it bothered me and other engineers that many manufacturing and engineering jobs had moved out of the U.S. We started an initiative to keep jobs here. To keep jobs here, we had to get so good at what we did that we could compete with anyone in the world. That was a big motivator people understood, and we succeeded in not outsourcing jobs. When they felt like we could do this together, they were motivated to change. [20:33] What is your innovation process? People say innovation can’t be a process, but that’s rubbish. At every company, a large part of what they do is routine product design. That work can be done exactly like a factory. I call it mass design. When I came to Goodyear, no one had time for creativity because they were all working on routine work. Then we started doing front-end innovation, and it was extremely cumbersome. Every idea turned into a project that went on for years, and people quit because they didn’t want to work for years on a project only to have it killed. I knew we couldn’t keep working like that. Around this time, Lean Startup came out, and we tried that and found we could evaluate 100 times more ideas. I challenge people to give me the one assumption or question that makes or breaks the project. Then I ask them to answer that question in one week with the minimum amount of money. When it’s answered, we go to the next question. After the third question, we either spend money on technology development or freeze the project and work on something else. Once you’ve evaluated a couple of hundred new ideas and found one or two to develop, focus on your knowledge gaps. If you can fill those gaps, you’re back in a vast space of many ideas, and you can often develop more than one product. [29:55] What are the three phases of your innovation process? Create Effects—be creative, try as many different things as possible to quickly figure out which ones are beneficial Efficient Knowledge Development—close your knowledge gaps Mass Design Action Guide: Put the information Norbert shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links: Check out Norbert’s book, Winning Innovation Visit Norbert’s website, Lean Driven Innovation Innovation Quote “If you want to be successful with innovation today, you have to be the best at what you do and how you do it.” – Norbert Majerus Thanks! Thank you for taking the journey to product mastery and learning with me from the successes and failures of product innovators, managers, and developers. If you enjoyed the discussion, help out a fellow product manager by sharing it using the social media buttons you see below. Source

The value of patents and trademarks for product managers Today we are talking about what product managers and leaders should know about intellectual property (IP) protection. Some organizations have a robust IP protection system that is part of their product management and development process while IP is an afterthought for others. What do you need to know about IP?  Let’s find out. Helping us is Rich Goldstein—a patent attorney, entrepreneur, author, and speaker who helps people protect and capitalize on their valuable ideas. He also authored the American Bar Association’s book on IP titled The ABA Consumer Guide to Obtaining a Patent. He originally studied electrical engineering at Stony Brook in New York, a highly rated engineering school. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [4:48] What IP protection mechanisms should product professionals know about? Patents protect products Copyright protects content Trademarks protect branding [7:13] When are trade secrets useful? A trade secret isn’t something you file for. You just have to keep it secret. Trade secrets are appropriate for products that cannot be reverse-engineered, like Coca-Cola’s secret formula or data used within an artificial intelligence system. Patents are useful for products that are out in the open, like the components of a physical product. [12:51] What is the value of protecting IP? IP protection is valuable when your company would be hurt economically or offended if your competition were to copy your IP. In general, there are two reasons for patenting or trademarking something. First, IP protection can help you while your company is operating. You can slow down your competition and hold on to market share. Second, IP is valuable when your company is acquired. The entity acquiring your company can’t do what you’re doing without your IP, so they’re willing to pay much more. During operation, you determine whether IP is worth it based on how much revenue you’ll gain vs. how much the IP costs, but if you get all the way to exit, you will always get a huge ROI on whatever you spend on IP. You can also leverage IP for licensing. [16:56] How much do trademarks and patents cost? Trademarks cost a lot less than patents. Generally, U.S. domestic trademarks are a few thousand dollars, while domestic patents are tens of thousands. International trademarks and patents cost more. [19:00] What can product managers do to help with IP protection for new products? Look for product differentiation that you can keep exclusive. If you can differentiate your product in a way your competition cannot because you own the IP, you have an advantage. It’s gold if you can find features in the overlap between what’s patentable and what’s marketable. If your customers want it and your competitors can’t make it, they won’t even want to compete. [22:03] At what point in time should product managers be thinking about IP? In much of the world, it’s too late to apply for a patent after you’ve made the product public. In the U.S., you can file for a patent up to one year after you make the product public. You don’t lose the rights to file a trademark after you’ve used the name publicly, but if someone else files a trademark on the same name earlier than you do, you have a complicated and expensive situation. You should apply for a patent at the earliest point you have something valuable. Then follow-up as improvements are made. For example, if you have an idea to create a non-toxic cleaning product, that’s an aspiration, not something valuable. But if you find a plant extract that can break down grease that no one has ever talked about before, that’s unique and valuable. Even if you don’t know the exact formula for your product, you should file a preliminary patent application. Six months later when you’ve found the ideal formula, you can file a follow-up patent application. If someone else filed a patent about the same extract in between, you have priority because of your preliminary patent. [26:26] How can product managers put a spotlight on the value of IP in organizations with immature IP protection systems? If your company has not been pursuing IP protection, your first job is to get everyone onboard with the potential value of IP, including the people who make the budgets. In an environment that hasn’t valued IP, it’s hard to convince others to allocate budget to protect an idea. Get everyone to say yes to pursuing and protecting ideas. You should have a program to look for things developed by R&D that might be valuable in the marketplace so you pursue them at the right time. [27:57] Is there any value for you in your career to have your name on a patent? Yes, when a company puts their resources behind something you created, it looks good on your resume or CV. People will see you do valuable work and are valued for the work you do. Action Guide: Put the information Rich shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links: Listen to Rich’s podcast, Innovations and Breakthroughs on Apple Podcasts or Spotify Learn more about Goldstein Patent Law Visit Rich’s website Check out Rich’s book, The ABA Consumer Guide to Obtaining a Patent Innovation Quote “The old saying, ‘If you build a better mouse trap, the world will beat a path to your door,’ is not true. It’s important to sell.” – Rich Goldstein 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 people talking Today we are talking about being a better facilitator. The ability to get a group of people to work together, exploring a problem, coming up with ideas, making a decision, and more, is a valuable capability for an organization. It is also a great capability for product managers and leaders. If you are not good at this yet, this discussion is perfect for you. If you are already an accomplished facilitator, I’m sure you’ll find some insights as well, to be even more effective. Our guest to help us with this topic has prepared many senior leaders, VPs, and CEOs to be more effective facilitators. He is an executive coach and started his coaching business, Essential Communications, in 1990, and also hosts the podcast “The Look & Sound of Leadership.” The list of companies with names we would all recognize where he has helped to improve leaders is too long to go into, but know he is the person behind many senior executives. His name is Tom Henschel. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [5:33] In your recent interview with Don Miller, you did an excellent job actively listening. How can we get better at active listening? Active listening is really hard. I’ve been working on it for years, and it’s a race with no finish line. You have to make an agreement with yourself that everything else can wait—you have nothing to do but listen. You have to let go of your ego. When I was talking with Don Miller, who is a big celebrity, I could have totally gotten into my head, thinking, “I have to do well!” I’ve learned none of that stuff matters. You have to get over it and do your work. I didn’t know how the conversation with Don would go, and I didn’t really care. Whatever was going to happen was going to be just fine. [10:54] What makes you a likeable person? I’ve worked really hard to be willing to focus on the other person. I’m happy if I listen to you for 30 minutes and you never know anything about me. As a coach, I turn the focus on my clients, but it’s not just for my job—if we met at a party, I would listen to you. My mother taught us how to chat with people by asking about them, so I’ve been doing it since I was a kid. [15:31] What are the benefits of being a good group facilitator? You get better results if you can facilitate the group. Otherwise it’s like a bunch of people driving in a bus where no one has the steering wheel. A good facilitator gets people talking. You can facilitate something you don’t know anything about. As a professional facilitator, I never know the content or jargon of the meeting, but I don’t need to. I’m only there to drive the bus; I don’t pick the road. [18:13] What are the characteristics of a good facilitator? Be fearless of rooms full of people. Stop being a participant and separate yourself from the team. Be able to track the content and emotion happening in the room by answering questions like, What are we supposed to be talking about? What are we actually talking about? What is the emotional content in the room? Be non-judgmental. Your job is not to scold, approve, or correct. Your job is to get to the goal. [21:00] What is a good outcome for a facilitator? Have a clear goal. As a facilitator, I have the wheel of the bus. I don’t own the outcome, and I’m not contributing, but my job is to get the group to the goal. I’m always paying attention to whether we’re moving toward the goal. [22:35] How can product managers be effective facilitators when they have a vested interest in the decision? Be transparent. When you’re a participant and not a neutral facilitator, don’t lead the conversation and then at the end state your opinion. Instead, start by sharing where you’re coming from and saying you would like to hear what everyone has to say. Then stop talking so everyone else can talk about it. [24:04] How can we make sure everyone’s voice is heard? This is always a challenge. It’s our job as facilitators to ensure everyone is heard, including those who are reticent and don’t seem to have the tools to share information. You need to give these people tools. One simple tool is breaking people into groups or breakout rooms of about three people each. Most people who won’t talk in a large group will talk in a small group. Before you split into breakout rooms, pose the question you’ll be discussing. Then put everyone on mute for 60 seconds to give them a chance to put their thoughts together before going into the discussion. Once they’ve had time to think and are in small groups, reluctant people often are more willing to talk. Be willing to manage people who talk too much and go off topic. Don’t get caught up in your emotion and don’t judge, but be courageous in managing the conversation. If someone is talking to much or going off topic, simply address them by name and say something like, “I want to be sure everybody has a chance to be heard” or “I really want to be sure we stay on the topic of . . . .” Then address someone else by name and say, “It looked like you were ready to speak.” I gave myself permission to interrupt by remembering that my job is not to make people feel good; it’s to get the group to the destination. Instead of disapproving of one person, I’m advocating for the bigger team. [32:02] What other tips do you have for facilitators? Give clear instructions. Use Liberating Structures. This is a free online resource that provides 30+ exercises for facilitators to get people talking. Some of them are simple and others are deep. They give you the gift of structure, so you can tell the team what to do and how to do it. You take control of the team, and the team is grateful to know what to do. It’s your responsibility to prepare to facilitate. Do your homework on the outcome you want to achieve, and learn how to run an exercise. Action Guide: Put the information Tom shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links: Listen to episodes 137 and 162 with Tom Henschel Listen to Don Miller’s interview with Tom (Business Made Simple, episode 48) Learn more about Tom and Essential Communications Get free facilitation resources at LiberatingStructures.com Innovation Quote “What have you changed your mind about lately?” – Dave Stachowiak 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 from a medical device company bringing oxygen to kids who need it – for product managers Today we are dissecting how a product came into being, examining it from initial insight through product development and to launch. Joining us is Mark Adkins, co-founder and CEO of LeanMed, a medical device company for the medically underserved regions of the world. He is also an adjunct professor teaching product innovation for the University of Pittsburgh and has served in many product management roles.  Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:09] What problem did you uncover and what is your current product? Pediatric pneumonia is the #1 killer of children in the world. Eight hundred thousand children will die this year from pneumonia, and 99% of those deaths are in low-income nations. One of the primary causes is lack of access to medical oxygen. Our solution is a solar-powered oxygen production system called the O2 Cube, a device that fills oxygen cylinders. Clinical studies have shown if we can make medical oxygen available to these children, we can cut the mortality rate by a third. [4:49] Take us back to the beginning, before the O2 Cube was even a concept. What was the genesis of the idea? I teach a course called Managing Medical Product Innovation at the University of Pittsburgh. A medical student in my class, James Newton, traveled to Malawi in Africa and saw firsthand that kids were dying from pneumonia. When he came back, he formed Team Oxygen with some of his classmates and me as their mentor. We won first place in an entrepreneurial competition at the University of Pittsburgh and earned $10,000, which we used to start LeanMed in 2018. [6:58] What happened next? How did you develop the product? We were in a race to get to market. We’re an innovation company, not a research company. There’s a long regulatory pathway for brand-new medical devices, but we look for proven technology that exists today in high-income countries, and through innovation and strategic licensing agreements, we bring that healthcare to the developing world. Philips Healthcare donated us an oxygen concentrator and an oxygen compressor. With the donation and money from the competition, we built the first operational prototype in my garage with solar panels on my roof. We did some early design work with a local design firm and got our website going. We got quite of bit of flak for not having IP. We integrated off-the-shelf technologies in a clever way. We modified the device for use in sub-Saharan Africa and entered a global licensing agreement with Philips Healthcare to manufacture and sell their oxygen compressor, which they had discontinued. Strategic licensing agreements can be lower risk, lower cost, and faster to market than inventing something new. Our missions align, as Philips also has a mission to save lives and bring healthcare to the developing world. [16:29] How did you know you were on the right track to creating technology that could work for people in developing areas? We got involved in the Every Breath Counts Coalition, a community fighting pediatric pneumonia that runs Zoom calls every week. There are over a hundred people on the calls, including NGOs (non-governmental organizations) like the Gates Foundation and OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) like Philips. We learned from others’ experiences and met people in Africa. Through customer discovery with these people, we learned that solar would be effective. We learned the local clinics can’t keep children overnight, so they refer them to a hospital. We developed the O2 Cube to fill small oxygen cylinders that can be used while the child is transported on a motor scooter or bicycle to the hospital. We also visited clinics and went to conferences about pediatric pneumonia. [20:12] What did you do next? In 2019 we entered an incubator called the Idea Foundry and received another $10,000, which we used to fund a project to provide pulse oximeters to seven health centers in Malawi. We continued to talk to people at the clinics and validate the O2 Cube. [23:48] Did you feel pressure to get your product out faster to save lives? Yes, it was frustrating. I wanted things to move faster. In 2020, COVID threw gasoline on the fire. People were dying of COVID around the world because they couldn’t get supplemental oxygen. We partnered with a student team from the University of Duquesne and built a freestanding prototype. [25:44] What’s the state of the product now? 2021 has been our breakout year. In March, the WHO recognized the O2 Cube as an innovative health technology for low-resource nations, a prestigious recognition. We’ve created a completely new product category—solar-powered micro oxygen production. In May, we signed the agreement with Philips to manufacture and sell the technology. This fall, we were finalists in a University of Pittsburgh competition and earned $50,000, which we are using to engineer the commercial product. In September, we launched a crowdfunding campaign. At the end of 2021, we will turn on the first O2 Cube at a pediatric ward in Nigeria. Seeing that video of a child getting oxygen from a cylinder filled by the O2 Cube will be the best Christmas present I’ve ever gotten. [30:02] What constitutes an MVP in the environment your product is going to? There’s a myth you can’t do MVPs in the medical device field. We’re living proof you can. Our current O2 Cube is an MVP. It produces oxygen and will save lives, but it’s not the final product. We will learn about the O2 Cube’s engineering and application and produce a final commercial product in 2023. [32:17] What do you still need to learn? People in the clinics need to get comfortable doing pulse oximetry and prescribing oxygen, since some of them have never had access to oxygen before. We also need to see if the cylinders will work in transit. Will patients be able to get to the referring hospital properly, and will the clinic get the cylinders back? Philips Healthcare and the Gates Foundation want to see oxygen as a utility in the developing world, like gas, electricity, and water. We’re working with four different companies who will supply oxygen, buy the O2 Cube, and sell it to clinics. Action Guide: Put the information Mark shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links: Learn more about LeanMed Invest in LeanMed’s crowdfunding campaign Innovation Quote “Mission-driven innovation.” – Mark Adkins 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 from disrupting the insurance industry – for product managers Today we are talking about creating disruptive products that challenge existing industries. A classic example of this is the digital camera that disrupted the film industry and contributed to the collapse of Kodak. Disruption occurs when we think of how a problem can be solved in a completely different way. It is typically accompanied by new technology or the application of technology in a novel manner. Our guest is creating disruption in a very old industry—insurance. His name is Konrad Heimpel and he is the VP of Product for GetSafe, based in Heidelberg, Germany. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:01] How did you become interested in disrupting the insurance industry? I was born with a walking disability, and without the very good health insurance we have in Germany, my parents would not have been able to afford treatment for me. I’ve experienced the difference insurance can make in people’s lives. Insurance is a great achievement and a relevant challenge. It still has a bad reputation, and I want to help it have a good reputation and be accessible for everyone. [5:15] What are you doing to disrupt the insurance industry? At GetSafe, we’re making use of the megatrend we’ve seen over the last few decades: people using their smartphones to steer their lives. Insurance has not been fully digitized, but there is no reason it can’t be, because there are no physical goods being exchanged.  We’ve built an app where people can buy and manage their coverage and make claims. We’re digitizing and simplifying insurance, making it more transparent, easier, and faster for customers. We sell B2C and currently offer the app for a range of property and casualty (P&C) insurance. [7:33] What makes your approach to insurance disruptive? The app sounds simple but is quite complex. The insurance industry is highly regulated. Any transaction must be 100% traceable, unlike in most ecommerce industries. When someone buys insurance, we’re obliged to provide coverage, so we can’t lose any information. No matter how we iterate our platform, everything must be 100% backward-compatible. The regulations and need for backward compatibility make the coding behind the app very complex. Collecting data at every touchpoint and simplifying the user experience would be a huge effort for old insurance companies. That gives us an advantage. [12:41] How are you using data? We collect behavior data and customer feedback to improve the user experience. For example, on the app we explain what an insurance contract covers. We collect data as users read explanations and use that to optimize how we present information. We also use data to recommend the right coverage, make better risk predictions, and provide better coverage. [21:09] How do you discover how to make a better user experience? The key is talking to users a lot and listening to their feedback. Many users are happy to give feedback, and we collect and analyze it and try to see patterns. If we see something we want to know more about, we jump on a call and talk to the user. You can get valuable insights from talking to just five or six people. It’s crucial to talk to customer service. Insurance is complicated, and we still receive calls and emails every day from people asking questions about specific situations. We listen carefully to hear what they’re really asking. That’s our greatest source of information. [25:34] As you scale, how do you decide which product features to implement and which ones to say no to? I’m a huge fan of iterating fast and listening to feedback and data—put out a first version very quickly that solves at least part of the problem and then learn from it. It’s not a good practice to have 10 developers working for six months to build something big that doesn’t have any impact. On a daily basis, listening to customer feedback is the most important part of making feature decisions. For our long-term strategy, we find indicators of good business outcome. For example, we predicted the customer lifetime value and tried to see correlations with important product metrics, like how does the processing speed of the claim correlate with the customer’s happiness and business outcome? We need data like these to make decisions that will provide value to the customer and to the business. [29:16] What advice do you have for product managers who haven’t started working with data science yet? As a product manager, you need to be good at balancing gut feeling and data. It’s your job to minimize uncertainty in your outcome and decide when you have enough data to make a decision. Be strict about using data, doing proper experiments, and measuring success. You need to be able to tell people how you moved the metrics. Have a plan for carefully measuring metrics before you start. Action Guide: Put the information Konrad shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links: Learn more about GetSafe Connect with Konrad and GetSafe on Linkedin Checkout the GetSafe blog on Medium Innovation Quote “If I had an hour to solve a problem, I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions.”  – Albert Einstein Thanks! Thank you for taking the journey to product mastery and learning with me from the successes and failures of product innovators, managers, and developers. If you enjoyed the discussion, help out a fellow product manager by sharing it using the social media buttons you see below. Source

Steps for creating world-changing products Today we are talking about radical product thinking, which is a mindset and process for innovating smarter. Our guest, Radhika Dutt, will help us understand radical product thinking. She is an entrepreneur and product leader who has participated in four acquisitions, two of which were companies she founded. She has built products in industries including broadcasting, media, advertising, technology, government, consumer, robotics, and wine. She also teaches entrepreneurship and innovation at Northeastern University. She cofounded the Radical Product Thinking movement of leaders creating vision-driven change, along with authoring the book Radical Product Thinking: The New Mindset for Innovating Smarter. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [1:56] What put you on the path to being a product leader? My path to product leadership has been through entrepreneurship and product diseases. Regardless of which industry I was in, I kept seeing the same patterns of diseases. For example, hero syndrome is when you get so focused on being big and scaling you forget about the problem you set out to solve. Other diseases are pivot-itis and obsessive sales disorder. I learned from these product diseases and developed an intuition after really hard lessons. I wondered, are we all doomed to learn these hard lessons or can we share intuition to build better product and avoid product diseases? That burning question started Radical Product Thinking. Two colleagues and I built a framework that translated our intuition into steps for building world-changing products systematically. I’ve realized that product is a way of thinking. Building products is how you create change. Your title is irrelevant—if you’re building products and thinking about how to engineer change, you’re applying product thinking. [9:05] Why did you write Radical Product Thinking: The New Mindset for Innovating Smarter? I realized we need to change how we build products. We’ve been taught to keep iterating until you find product market fit—just keep trying different things. We need to become more vision-driven and think of our product as a mechanism for creating change in the world. That starts with having a clear picture of the change you want to bring about and being able to translate that to actions. Whenever your vision becomes disconnected from your actions, product diseases set in. The key to building better products while avoiding product diseases is avoiding breaks in the chain from vision to action. [11:23] Tell us about the five elements of Radical Product Thinking, starting with Vision. We need to unlearn the myths that a good vision is a Big Hairy Audacious Goal (BHAG), broad slogan, or short tagline. For example, “contributing to human progress while empowering people to express themselves” could be the vision of a piano teacher, a post-it note company, or anything else. A good vision should be a detailed North Star for decision-making.  A BHAG vision like this is not useful because you can’t use it to evaluate features and figure out what to do and not do. A good vision answers: Whose world are you trying to change? What does the world look like for them today? Why does that world need changing? When will we know we’ve accomplished our mission? How are we going to bring about the change? A vision with this level of detail gives teams enough direction to make decisions. For example, a good vision is: “Today when amateur wine drinkers want to find wines that they’re likely to like, they have to find attractive-looking wine bottles or pick wines that are on sale. This is unacceptable because it leads to so many disappointments, and it’s hard to learn about wine this way. We envision a world where finding wines you like is as easy as finding movies you like on Netflix. We’re bringing about this world through a recommendations algorithm that matches wines to your taste and an operational setup that delivers these wines to your door.” A radical vision gives you an exact sense of what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. [18:40] Strategy Strategy is converting your mission into steps. Strategy requires answering the four RDCL (“radical”) questions: Real Pain Points: Why does someone come to your product? Design: What is our solution to those pain points? Capabilities: What is our special sauce that powers the solution (technology, IP, infrastructure, partnerships)? Logistics: How does the solution get to customers (support, sales, training customers, professional services)? Derive your strategy directly from your vision to avoid breaking the chain and avoid product disease. [22:13] Prioritization Use your vision in everyday decision-making. When you’re prioritizing, you’re trading the long-term against the short-term. Think about your vision on the y-axis and your short-term survival on the x-axis. If you’re a startup, survival depends on revenue and funding. If you’re in a larger company, survival depends on support from stakeholders and your boss. Easy decisions are good for your survival and vision. But sometimes you need to invest in the vision—making decisions that are good for your vision but not helpful for short-term survival, e.g., refactoring code for three months. The opposite of investing in vision is taking on vision debt—making decisions that are good for your short-term survival but bad for your vision. Obsessive sales disorder happens when you keep accumulating vision debt, for example, adding a custom feature that doesn’t match the vision but helps you win a deal. None of the quadrants of your vision vs. survival graph are bad per se, but you have to find the right mix for your organization. In sprint planning, write your features on post-it notes, draw your x- and y-axes, and determine where each feature fits on the axes. Choose more features from the ideal quadrant (supporting vision and survival), one or two from the investing-in-vision quadrant, and as few as possible from the vision debt quadrant. Prioritizing in this way conveys your intuition for decision-making to your team and communicates how you’re trading off the long-term against the short-term. It also helps you communicate with your stakeholders and achieve alignment. Read the book to learn about the last two elements, Execution and Management and Culture. Action Guide: Put the information Radhika shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links: Learn more about Radical Product Thinking Check out Radhika’s book, Radical Product Thinking, on Amazon Connect with Radhika on LinkedIn Innovation Quote “With great power comes great responsibility .” – Spider-Man 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 use the Modified Agile for Hardware Development Framework Today we are talking about using a modified version of Scrum for hardware projects. Many teams have tried adopting Scrum for developing hardware products, not always successfully. This is such as big topic, we have not one but two guests to help us with it—Dorian Simpson and Gary Hinkle. They think they have the answer for applying Agile principles to hardware projects, and they call it the Modified Agile for Hardware Development (MAHD) Framework. Dorian has a deep background in product development, starting in engineering and then moving to business leadership roles.  These include roles at Motorola and AT&T along with dozens of companies as an innovation and product development consultant. He’s also the author of The Savvy Corporate Innovator, which is about applying Agile principles to idea development in organizations. Gary also has an extensive background in product development with senior roles at SAIC and Tektronix. He has held R&D leadership roles and founded Auxilium in 2002 to help companies improve their R&D and leadership practices and transform their new product development using Agile practices. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:56] Can you summarize Scrum for us and share what aspects of it aren’t suited for hardware projects? Scrum is one of the most widely-used flavors of Agile, mostly applied to software development projects. It starts with describing the customer experience through user stories. Teams work on high-priority user stories in rapid cycles called sprints, deliver working software that is validated by users, and incorporate feedback quickly into the next cycle. This mechanism is great for evolving a product and figuring things out as you go, and those challenges apply to hardware products, but the basic mechanics of Scrum, optimized for software development, are missing some pieces for hardware development. The first missing piece is big-picture planning. Hardware projects almost always have a schedule—the project has to end and the product as to go into production. This end goal and transition to manufacturing requires a big-picture plan, which Scrum doesn’t account for. Scrum also doesn’t account for the dependencies involved in physical products, mostly associated with physical materials’ lead times, which need to be factored into the project plan. Software and hardware have to come together from multiple disciplines, and typically all the pieces can’t come together in a traditional two-week sprint. When companies try to implement Scrum or Agile for hardware, they get hung-up on the mechanics. We focus on four key Agile principles, which give us the benefits of Agile without worrying about the dogmatic, detailed tactics: Autonomous teams Timeboxed learning cycles Rapid prototyping Engaging with customers In hardware development, user stories have to be looked at differently. The user still needs to benefit from the product, but you can’t directly translate user stories to features of a physical product. User stories are still a valuable starting point to understand the customer, but hardware teams have to shift gears quickly to the physical attributes of the product, the complexities of designing hardware, and regulatory concerns. Some Agile purists tell hardware teams to write a user story for every requirement, feature, and specification, but we don’t know anyone who’s done that successfully. [15:01] How does your MAHD (Modified Agile for Hardware Development) Framework work? One of the big differences between MAHD and Scrum is the onramp, which is a set of five interactive, collaborative activities between marketing and R&D. To get the project started, use an Agile project brief, which is a one-to-three-page document that describes the customer, market targets, timing, price points, decision factors for customers, positioning in the market, etc. This kickoff gives you a clear understanding of what you’re trying to accomplish. Next, look at user stories and physical attributes of the product. We use a tool called a focus matrix, which allows us to see how user stories relate to product attributes. Using the focus matrix is a collaborative team exercise. Identify the areas of focus and where to remove risk. Next, create an iteration plan, which is the pig picture of the project that replaces a detailed Gantt chart. Look at the areas of risk, major strategic questions and where you want to answer them, rapid prototyping, and customer engagement. Identify the right place to bring those components together to create a prototype you can put in front of customers to get the feedback loop going. After this, the tactics are similar to Scrum. You work in timeboxed execution cycles, working through tasks as a team. However, with hardware projects, you have multiple sprints working toward a higher-level iteration or alignment point where you bring together hardware and software. [20:10] What are the benefits of the MAHD Framework? The iteration plan helps teams communicate. Backlogs can make people’s heads spin; the iteration plan operates at a higher level than sprints, so you can communicate the big picture of what you’re doing when. Any manager or stakeholder can comprehend the iteration plan. The MAHD Framework allows teams to learn about risks and problems early on, enabling the team to redirect. The collaborative team environment, where teams are learning together over short cycles, is much more powerful than just letting things go and assuming they’ll be okay over a long period. The two-week sprint cycle and team accountability force the team to get urgent action items done. [26:47] What’s an example of using MAHD on a project? We worked with a thermal imaging company that, prior to using MAHD, took six to eight months to get the product requirements document (PRD) approved, spent a lot of time on detailed Gantt charts, and still had R&D complaining that marketing didn’t know what they were asking for. They began using the MAHD Framework and worked through the first onramp, and some people were not comfortable with the uncertainty. They took a while to get comfortable with not having all the specifications and learning during the first few iterations. They needed to answer some big strategic questions about the core technology, like the image resolution the customers needed. MAHD allowed the team to work with more uncertainty, and they got their kickoffs down to two months. They have greater confidence their product is right for their customers because they’re working through alignment points, customer engagement, and prototyping. [30:34] What are the reactions of teams using the MAHD Framework? More than once, managers have told us their teams are happier using MAHD, as well as more focused and collaborative. Action Guide: Put the information Dorian and Gary shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links: Learn more about the MAHD Framework and get a free membership and resources Learn more about Gary, Dorian, and their consulting company, Auxilium Connect with Dorian and Gary on LinkedIn Check out Dorian’s book, The Savvy Corporate Innovator Download the MAHD Overview for Executives PDF Innovation Quotes “Innovation is not about saying yes to everything. It’s about saying no to all but the most crucial features.” – Steve Jobs “Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs.” – Peter Drucker Thanks! Thank you for taking the journey to product mastery and learning with me from the successes and failures of product innovators, managers, and developers. If you enjoyed the discussion, help out a fellow product manager by sharing it using the social media buttons you see below. Source