Product Mastery Now for Product Managers, Leaders, and Innovators

Innovation accounting for teams, managers, and strategy – for product managers Today we are talking about measuring innovation effectiveness in organizations. To help us is the person who has written the book on the topic, Innovation Accounting, Esther Gons. Esther is the CEO of GroundControl, an Innovation Accounting software platform to help corporate ventures with the development of new business models. She has been an entrepreneur for over 20 years and mentored several hundred startups. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [1:59] Why did you write Innovation Accounting? There’s not much information about measuring innovation effectiveness. Eric Ries coined the term innovation accounting in his book Lean Startup. My background is in startups, where innovation accounting is the metrics and accountability of the team to make data-driven decisions. Later, I worked with corporates and realized there is a huge need to report on and measure innovation progress. My coauthor and I decided that to help corporates do disruptive innovation, we needed to write this book. [3:58] Who needs an innovation accounting system? People use innovation as a catch-all word for everything, but if you want to do disruptive innovation—new markets, new business models, high-risk, high-return—you need a structured approach. You need to de-risk the innovation, and you need indicators you’re going in the right direction. Your financial accounting system can’t provide these. You need an innovation accounting system for disruptive innovation to take off. [7:44] In your book, you address innovation accounting on several levels. In the first level, tactical innovation, what metrics should teams use to measure innovation? The tactical or team level is the most important level. In this level, we find out what the teams need to move forward and make decisions. Teams use venture-based and team-specific indicators to make decisions. Metrics should also help the company see how fast the team is learning. You can measure the number of experiments done over time or per sprint, but these metrics are easy to game; you don’t want to do experiments just for the sake of doing experiments. Measure the insights and learnings from each experiment and the amount of time and money spent on each experiment. Any metric should be something you can improve or make decisions upon. [14:34] What specific metrics should we be using? The most important one is the learning ratio, which is the experiments you found insights from divided by all the experiments you conducted. Learning is what you should be doing; if your team is doing other things, it’s not going well. Once you’re more mature, you can measure the value/cost ratio. [18:37] How is innovation measured at the managerial level? The managerial level focuses on having a venture board or decision board that can help the teams move forward. The board makes small bets in the beginning and funds the projects that are promising and have a higher confidence level. The venture board wants to see the confidence level with evidence. The metrics are about managing the funnel of investment decisions. [24:04] How does innovation accounting influence strategy? It’s a loop—strategy influences innovation accounting and innovation accounting influences strategy. The strategy level has two pillars of indicators. The first pillar is understanding why you’re looking at a particular area, finding out if your core portfolio is under threat, and looking at new business models, new markets, and diversification. The second pillar is understanding your ROI. Even if you just started and have no revenue, look for progress toward the vision of where you want to go. See if your innovation thesis is validated. Action Guide: Put the information Esther shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links: Check out Esther’s book, Innovation Accounting Learn about Ground Control Visit Esther’s website Innovation Quote “If there is one thing we can learn from the past, it is that we are very bad at predicting the future.” -Esther Gons 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 better understand consumer decisions Today we are revisiting one of the best tools for product managers, Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD). Our guest has been applying JTBD to help SaaS companies sell better, retain more, and avoid 6-figure go-to-market mistakes. His name is Aggelos Mouzakitis, and his company is called Growth Sandwich. JTBD will help you regardless of your industry or if you are a SaaS provider or not. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:27] What does Jobs-to-be-Done mean to you? Jobs-to-be-Done is a theory that explains consumer decisions and provides tools to deeply understand consumer actions. My approach to JTBD is very actionable; I care about putting the theory into action. [4:21] What are some examples of how you’ve applied JTBD? I worked for a video conferencing solution, a competitor to the most popular solution. Their value proposition was that they were the simplest video conferencing tool because they were browser-based. During the pandemic, they had explosive churn and explosive growth. They hired me to fix the explosive churn. I did a value gap analysis, which is Jobs-to-be-Done driven. I started with interviewing the power users, churned users, and fresh users. I asked them what job they expected from the product. I then looked at what job the ideal users needed done and what jobs the churned users were trying to do. The churn problem became a positioning problem. Some users used the tool as a temporary solution to do video meetings but later switched to a full-feature solution. They weren’t good users for the product; we needed to discourage use cases that were not right for the product. We also created a Jobs-to-be-Done-driven cancellation survey. Previously, the company had a cancellation survey that asked which competitor users were switching to, but it didn’t tell their perception of each solution. On the new survey, instead of naming competitors, we described the competitors—a more secure solution, a solution with more features for educators, etc. Now the data gave us insight into the job-to-be-done behind the switch. [16:24] Tell us more about the actions you took in your example. First, we audited existing information to know what sort of research to design. Then, we defined our power (ideal) user, in our case with a combination of retention criteria and engagement criteria. Once we had a list of 100-150 people, we started recruitment. We put together an email and provided an Amazon giftcard as a thank-you for their time. Users booked time for an interview on my calendar. During interviews, know what you want to learn in the conversation and have notes, but let the conversation flow. Interviewing people requires fast thinking and talent. We asked for consent before recording the conversation, and then we started the conversation with an icebreaker. After the discussion, we paid the users. Next, we did analysis. I watched the videos and took notes on observations and insights. Then I clustered the feedback from all the interviews, noting themes and categories. Last, I presented to the rest of the team. Action Guide: Put the information Aggelos shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links: Check out Aggelos’s website, GrowthSandwich.com Connect with Aggelos on LinkedIn Innovation Quote “My only competitor is the person I was yesterday.” – Unknown Thanks! Thank you for taking the journey to product mastery and learning with me from the successes and failures of product innovators, managers, and developers. If you enjoyed the discussion, help out a fellow product manager by sharing it using the social media buttons you see below. Source

How product managers can focus on creating great products for their customers Today we are talking about the product-led organization. We have seen many organizations in the last few years move the product group and product roles to more prominent positions, putting clearer focus on creating great products for customers. To help us explore this topic is the founder of Pendo and the author of the book, The Product-Led Organization: Drive Growth by Putting Product at the Center of Your Customer Experience. You likely already know his name, which is Todd Olson, who joined us previously in episode 185. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [1:45] What makes a product-led company? Product-led companies put product at the center of the customer experience. Every department is thinking about how it can use product to better perform its activities, rather than the product management team leading the business. Companies like these are shifting from human-led motion to product- and digital-led motion. The company is the product in many ways. Your business is not just about how the product performs; it’s about the entire customer lifecycle. [3:40] What’s an example of a product-led company? Tesla is a very product-led business. Through the entire customer experience, all the interaction with the product from purchasing to updates is digital. [6:00] What are some tools for understanding customers? Empathy Maps force the product manager to get inside the head of the customer and find out what they’re thinking, hearing, and experiencing. Develop deep empathy for your customer. A great product lies in understanding what your users are going through. Observe customers using your product. Watch videos of customers using your product and thinking out loud. Record yourself using the software. Make sure the development team understands why you’re building the product. The what of how the product functions can change, but you should clearly understand the why. The best teams have collaboration between product management, development, and engineering. They can debate the what because they all have a deep sense of why. [14:30] How can we use data to get closer to our customers? We often have opinions about how our customers are using our product, and we may argue about those and get nowhere. Instead, we need to use data to find out what’s actually happening and find insights. I like to start with outliers. You might find a user who uses one feature more than two times as much as other users. You need to dig in and find out why. Often, outliers are trying to do something with your product that you make very hard for them to do. You don’t always want customers to be using features a lot. See if you can redesign the product to make it easier for them. [20:16] What are your suggestions for structuring and using roadmaps? Especially for B2B software, roadmaps are a critical part of communicating with customers. Even for B2C software, when we buy products, we’re investing in a company and a vision. We’re buying the roadmap. Because of that, it’s really valuable to put out a roadmap, not because you’re necessarily committing to do it, but because you’re signaling your direction. Your roadmap communicates to customers the direction you’re going and helps them know if that direction aligns with their objectives. Communicate that your roadmap is subject to change, and don’t make it too polished and specific. I like to use calendar view or force-ranked lists, which force customers to pick between tradeoffs. The roadmap is all about communication, both internally and with your customer. Action Guide: Put the information Todd shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links: Check out Todd’s book on Amazon Learn more about Pendo Connect with Todd on Twitter or LinkedIn Listen to TEI 185 with Todd Olson Innovation Quote “Great companies are built on great products.” – Elon Musk Thanks! Thank you for taking the journey to product mastery and learning with me from the successes and failures of product innovators, managers, and developers. If you enjoyed the discussion, help out a fellow product manager by sharing it using the social media buttons you see below. Source

How to stay relevant in an increasingly digital world – for product managers Today our guest is sharing the steps for successful digital transformation. He is Howard Tiersky, author of the Wall Street Journal bestselling book Winning Digital Customers: The Antidote to Irrelevance. He founded FROM, a digital transformation agency, which has won over 100 awards for user experience design, including for their work redesigning the Avis app which is now ranked by J.D. Power as #1 in the industry.  Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [1:50] What do you mean by digital transformation? There are two spheres of digital transformation. The outer sphere is the digital transformation of the world and the customer. Your customer is living an increasingly digital lifestyle. The mobile phone and other digital touchpoints are central to almost everything we do, and that’s been a big change in the past 15 years. The inner sphere is the digital transformation of the company. That’s your starting point to remaining relevant to a digitally-centric customer. If you’re not caught up to the transformation of the world, you become irrelevant. [4:39] What’s an example of a company’s digital transformation? Some people think only digitally native companies like Facebook or Google do well at digital transformation, but there are many legacy brands, born before the digital world, that have digitally transformed. For example, Starbucks has done a fantastic job integrating the mobile phone, allowing you to order and pay remotely. Taco Bell has remodeled their restaurants to have two separate drive-thru lanes, one for traditional orders and one for picking up food ordered on the app. Meeting the needs of the digital customer is not all about the app; Taco Bell remodeled their brick-and-mortar stores. Legacy companies can catch up and be toe-to-toe with digitally native companies. [10:04] Tell us about customer journey mapping. Customer journey mapping is the foundation of digital transformation, and customer research is the foundation of customer journey mapping. One mistake companies make is being so enthusiastic about mapping the future customer journey they forget about what’s happening right now. Enthusiasm for the future is great, but start with asking, “What’s our customer journey now?” Understand what happens to your customer when they interact with your product—what really happens, not the conceptual idea of what happens. Find the places you’re delighting your customer and the places you’re confusing or frustrating them. Be honest about your current journey, and use it as a starting place to create your future journey. Copy and paste the parts that are great and fix the places where the customer experiences pain and is not in a positive emotional state. You may discover pain points that are solvable with small, easy changes. Of course, you may need to make more complex changes, but look for the low-hanging fruit to get started. Delight customers by saving them time and effort. Uber did a great job with this. They not only make it easier to call a “taxi”; they also save customers the effort of telling the driver where they’re going or paying the driver. In digital transformation, one goal is to remove the things that frustrate or annoy your customer. The other goal is removing something that’s taking their time and effort, even if it’s not your fault; that creates delight. [19:00] Tell us about design thinking. I think of design thinking in three key parts: Prepare to ideate: Empathize with the customer and define the customer’s problem. Ideate: Create ideas. Test your ideas: Prototype and test. In our book, we’ve added some enhancements to design thinking: Pre-Ideation: Business outcomes: Identify your goal, like increasing upsell, reducing call-handling time, or increasing customer satisfaction. Understanding the market: You not only have to solve the problem for your customer but must also do so in a way that’s superior to your competitors’ products. Ideation: The book includes many tools you can use to generate ideas. Post-Ideation: Classic prioritization based on feasibility, desirability, and viability. Other prioritization components like risk factors and confidence level. [24:33] Where do companies run into problems with digital transformation? Sometimes, they don’t understand the customer, so they may be heading off in the wrong direction. Your transformation must be driven by the customer. You should focus on customers because they have the money, and success in business results from driving customers’ desired behavior. You’re going to invest a lot of time and money in digital transformation. For that investment to be worthwhile, it had better be driven by improving customer experience and driving customer behavior. Another problem is not having a clear strategy and having a general resistance to change. The biggest human resistance to transformation within organizations is fear of change. You need to inspire people, align them with what you’re doing, and make them comfortable. Collect as many allies as you can, but you’ll never get everyone on board with transformation, so unfortunately you need to be prepared to go to war with some people who will never be comfortable with change. Action Guide: Put the information Howard shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links: Check out Howard’s book Winning Digital Customers Get the first chapter of the book for free at WinningDigitalCustomers.com Learn more about FROM, a digital agency and consulting practice Innovation Quote “When the pace of change on the outside exceeds the pace of change on the inside, the end is near.” – Jack Welsh 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 small, focused tests can help product managers create better products Today we are talking about using experimenting and testing to create products customers love. To help us with this topic, Alex Mitchell is our guest. He is Director of Product at Kin Insurance and founder of The Modern Product Manager, which provides resources and courses for aspiring product managers. He also is involved in other organizations, lending his product expertise. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [3:47] Tell us about experimentation and testing. We need to have a broad definition of experimentation; it’s more than controlled experiments like A/B testing. Experimentation is a foundational and continuous element of product management. Don’t wait until you’ve built a feature to experiment. Test continuously throughout your product development lifecycle. Do small experiments to learn more and continually develop hypotheses you can test to help you make better decisions. [6:19] Product managers often become experts in their industry, and that can lead to assumptions. How do you test assumptions? Assumptions slow down innovation. One way to counter that is to involve more people in experimentation. Including your team and people outside your team will help keep innovation going and prevent you from getting complacent. Second, move around to different domains in your company if you can. This will help keep your ideas fresh and keep you coming up with testing and experimentation ideas. [8:25] What’s an example of using experimentation at Kin Insurance? At Kin Insurance, we sell home insurance to catastrophe regions like Florida and Louisiana. Through research, we observed that many customers were not making changes to their insurance after their initial purchase, like adding additional coverage, even if changes were in their best interest. We hypothesized they didn’t know they could make changes and if we let them know about additional products soon after their initial purchase, a meaningful percentage of people would at least be interested in learning more. If we were not taking an experimental approach to this, we might design a full-blown, intricate add-on system. We wanted the opposite since we were trying to validate whether our customers were interested. We took a simple approach and found a subset of customers eligible for flood insurance. A week after their initial purchase, we sent them an email conveying the benefits of flood insurance and asking if they were interested, and we found that many people were. We tested our hypothesis in a very short period, with a very small amount of effort. With testing like this, you can validate or invalidate your hypothesis, and you’ll learn other things along the way too. We did all this with no development effort and didn’t invest any of our most precious resources until we had validated our hypothesis and understood the customer experience well. You can use lightweight, scrappy tests to get information quickly and inexpensively. However, this may be different from how some of your colleagues are used to working. They might want a fully-developed plan, while you’re trying to do something you’ve never done before. Be prepared for skepticism, questions, and discomfort—that may be an indication you’re on the right track. [17:46] Have you seen an experiment produce unhelpful data? Why was that? One reason an experiment can produce unhelpful data is if it doesn’t line up with the hypothesis you’re trying to test or if you don’t have a way to make changes to prove or disprove your hypothesis. Another reason is if you’re looking at data that’s irrelevant to your experiment or attributing changes to your experiment that were actually caused by something else. Make sure you have someone on your team who understands statistical significance and what is likely to be noise or the result of an unrelated variable. [23:07] What key tip about experimenting would you like to leave us with? Your tests should be small, focused, and easy to explain. If you can’t explain in 15 seconds what you’re trying to learn and how you’re going to accomplish it, your test is probably too big. Staying focused gives you a better opportunity to learn and get others involved. Action Guide: Put the information Alex shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links: Read Alex’s articles on Medium Visit Alex’s website, TheModernProductManager.com Connect with Alex on LinkedIn Innovation Quote “Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.” – Elon Musk 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

Four feature prioritization methods product managers should know Today we are talking about methods for prioritizing product features. Joining us is András Juhász, a product manager for Smartly.io, a social media advertising company. He wrote an article on six methods to prioritize product features, and we’ll talk through some of them. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [1:30] What caused you to explore different ways to prioritize features? I think feature prioritization is an interesting topic on the product level and organization level. We ask, What problems are worth solving? What are the next best features? [3:17] How does the Kano Model work? The Kano Model uses two axes—satisfaction and execution—and shows how customer satisfaction depends on execution for each feature. It divides customer preferences into five different categories: Basic functionality—features customers expect, e.g., voice calling capability on a mobile phone. Poor execution decreases customer satisfaction, but great execution does not amaze customers. Performance—more is better, e.g., an electric car’s range. The more you provide, the more customer satisfaction you get. Excitement—positive surprises, e.g., fireworks appear when you complete a task on a to-do app. Customers don’t expect these features, but they are pleasantly surprised by them. Indifferent—features that don’t affect customers’ satisfaction, e.g., the thickness of a carton of milk. Reverse—more is worse, e.g., longer scripts at a call center. The more you provide, the less customer satisfaction you get. This model helps you prioritize features so you don’t underbuild or overbuild the product. [9:12] Tell us about the RICE Method. The RICE Method scores your product in four categories: Reach—how many users will be affected if you release the feature Impact—the value the feature creates, measured as a subjective score from 1 -5 or 1-10 Confidence—how much data is backing the feature, measured from 1-5 Effort—the time it will take to develop the feature, measured in hours, days, weeks, or months To calculate your total RICE score, multiply reach, impact, and confidence, and then divide by effort. [16:24] What’s the Effort vs. Impact Matrix? The Effort vs. Impact Matrix is a two-by-two matrix of effort and impact, which can each be either low or high. Low-impact, low-effort tasks are fill-ins for when the team is idle, e.g., component improvement. Low-impact, high-effort tasks are thankless tasks that are not providing much customer value but may still be necessary, e.g., security tasks. High-impact, low-effort tasks are the low-hanging fruit that provide immediate value. High-impact, high-effort tasks are major projects and functionalities that provide high customer value. [19:34] How does MoSCoW work? MoSCoW is an abbreviation for Must have, Should haves, Could haves, and Won’t haves. Must haves are the essential features your solution must deliver, the minimum valuable product; they are in your first iteration. Should haves are important but not essential features; they might be part of the first iteration or version 1.2. Could haves are small enhancements, adding color to your product; they might be in version 1.5. Won’t haves are functionalities you plan to exclude. Action Guide: Put the information András shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links: Read András’ article on 6 methods to prioritize features Connect with András on LinkedIn Read more articles from András on Medium Innovation Quote “I failed my way to success.” — Thomas Edison Thanks! Thank you for being an Everyday Innovator and learning with me from the successes and failures of product innovators, managers, and developers. If you enjoyed the discussion, help out a fellow product manager by sharing it using the social media buttons you see below. Source

Strategy, vision, and influence for product managers Today we are talking about the journey from product manager to product officer or product VP. Henry Latham, the founder of Prod MBA, is with us to share his experience and insights. He has been a product manager and managed a variety of product teams in multiple countries. At Product MBA, he helps product managers and owners accelerate their career by teaching them how to build great products. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [1:49] How do we formulate a product strategy? The four key competencies of product management are execution, product strategy, leadership, and leveraging customer insight. Product managers tend to focus on execution, which is important, but it’s hard to know whether we’re building the right thing—that knowledge comes from product strategy. For many people, this becomes a vicious cycle—you’re not practicing strategy so you’re ill-equipped to fill the gap when an opportunity arises or when you want to apply for a more senior role. A lot of people hit the glass ceiling at this point—they have execution down but they’re not building strategic muscle. Strategy is a messy term. Most people talk about strategy as a list of things to do, but we should think about strategy as making it clear what we’re doing and not doing. That comes with a framework of decision-making. For example, we could be really good at speed, like the fastest email application in the world. We’re not bothered about other stuff, but it’s very clear what is important for our product, customer, position in the market, and how we make money. Strategy isn’t that complicated. You don’t need the complex strategy of Facebook or Google. Start by simply answering, What is it we do and what is it we don’t do? Understand your unique selling point, your target customer, and specifically what they want. Then work out how to build a product that will deliver that specific outcome for them in a unique and valuable way that other people in the market aren’t doing. [11:31] How do you communicate vision to those you work with? Storytelling is a fundamental skill of any leader. When you’re teaching, people aren’t going to remember everything; they might only remember 10%. First, keep it simple. Second, tell a story about a customer. Talk about understanding whom you’re trying to serve and the struggles they’re facing. Get people inspired and focused around that. Communicate the unique thing you’re doing. Third, know how to bring data into that story. Communicate your vision and tie personal stories to that vision. Stories of how your product helps your customers remind people of why they’re doing what they’re doing. It’s a rare company that understands vision is not about buzzwords and inspiring sentences; it’s about how our actions and words consistently focus on how we’re creating a specific outcome for our customer, and that leads to a strong culture and a great product. [19:15] How do we influence others? To be an effective product leader, you need three things: Be mindful so you can look at things objectively and zoom out. Be resilient to stick with things when they get difficult. Be able to focus on the essentials so you can say no and stand up for what’s important for your company and team. You need to build your own product to build resilience and come up against your own ego. Take ownership of everything you do. You can read about tactics for influence, but you’re not going to stand up in the face of opposition unless you’re very strong in your convictions, your personal vision, your product vision, and your understanding of the customer. On top of this foundation, you need experience—not perfect experience, but some experience—to understand challenges, have competence, take action, and produce results. You need to be able to define, validate, and communicate a strategy effectively. [25:31] What mindset do product managers need? Many product managers reach a ceiling because they understand the framework and are experienced in managing development teams, but to level up they need soft skills, which are around mindset. Again, be mindful, resilient, and focused. Shift your mindset away from details that don’t matter to instead obsess over vision, strategy, and storytelling. As you get more senior, you need to get very good, very quickly at doing these key things, communicating them, and influencing people to follow you. To cultivate a strong product mindset, you need to have experience and see the value of a specialized offer in the market. As Jeff Bezos says, “Be strict with vision. Be flexible with the details.” You’re not going to stick with your vision if you haven’t built up convictions through experiences that create strong, resilient minds. Action Guide: Put the information Henry shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links: Check out Henry’s book Product Leadership Starts With You Learn about Product MBA Connect with Henry on LinkedIn Innovation Quote “It is rarely a mysterious technique that drives us to the top, but rather a profound mastery of what may well be a basic skill set.” – Josh Waitzkin  Thanks! Thank you for being an Everyday Innovator and learning with me from the successes and failures of product innovators, managers, and developers. If you enjoyed the discussion, help out a fellow product manager by sharing it using the social media buttons you see below. Source

Advice for product managers on learning, moving into different industries, and becoming problem experts Today we are talking about lessons learned in product management. Lending her insights is Eleanor Hasler, Senior Product Manager at Impala, a travel company making it simple to sell hotel rooms. She has had a variety of product roles and has some tips to share with us.  Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [1:39] What was your path to product work? I started at university studying politics but later decided to develop commercial skills and see if I could make the world a better place. I started working in talent in London and loved it because I got to meet so many incredible people but I felt I needed to get closer to the action. A turning point was participating in Techstars Startup Weekend, where I worked on a team to build a business in one weekend. We developed a cycling product, and I spent all day Sunday calling cafes to learn about the problem and find out if they were interested in helping cyclists. I loved the experience. After that, I was hiring for a product leadership role, and I loved every product person I met. I decided to quit my talent job and start from scratch. I worked for a company doing sales in exchange for their help learning product. I was overwhelmed with how much support and time people are willing to give when you’re willing to take a risk. After three months, I started working at a property tech startup helping people find places to rent. A year later, I started at FinTech, a banking company, and built an app that helped people become investors. Last year, I started working at Impala. People told me I was crazy to go into the travel industry at the start of the pandemic, but I believe crisis creates room for creativity and innovation. We’re now working on a platform to help hotel rooms sell quicker. [13:47] What kind of customer interactions get you excited? The biggest moments of joy are when I have a call with someone and talk about a potential solution, and then they email me a few days later and ask to talk again about new thoughts they’ve had. The magic happens when you’ve built a relationship with someone and built enough trust that they can tell you what’s not right. I start discovery calls by telling the customer that the more negative feedback they tell us, the more we can learn—please don’t be too nice. [16:47] What other experiences or decisions have been pivotal to where you are now as a product manager? One decision I’ve been really happy with is choosing building over learning. My intuition was to take courses and read books, but people advised me to build actual products. Books and courses are never going to teach you what product work will. Build earlier than you’re comfortable with. Don’t be afraid to take risks and start from scratch. Moving into a different industry with a fresh set of eyes can be a superpower rather than a hindrance because you’re not thinking about how things have been done, and you look from a customer’s lens. Don’t worry about having deep knowledge of a specific area; trust yourself to start from scratch. [21:19] How did you make the change to different industries and get companies to want you to help them? I think we should be deep subject matter experts, but it doesn’t take years or decades to get to that point. Any product manager is a naturally curious person who won’t back down until they’ve gotten to the bottom of a problem or new area of innovation. Every time I went into a new industry, I spent my evenings and weekends learning everything about that industry and getting excited about it. If you come in with drive and curiosity, companies, particularly startups, find you valuable. In a good startup, you’ll be in a completely different company every six months, so you need drive and excitement. [23:49] What advice do you want to leave product managers with as they develop their careers? Our job as product managers is to be experts of the problem and customer and to present that problem to a team, which then uses the knowledge from many areas to come up with a solution. One mistake I made was thinking I need to have all the answers. Great solutions are created by teams with diverse thinking. Action Guide: Put the information Eleanor shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful link: Visit Impala’s website Innovation Quote “Creativity is coming up with lots of new ideas, and innovation is doing things.” – Theodore Levitt Thanks! Thank you for being an Everyday Innovator and learning with me from the successes and failures of product innovators, managers, and developers. If you enjoyed the discussion, help out a fellow product manager by sharing it using the social media buttons you see below. Source

A strategic approach product managers can use for choosing product features Today we are talking about prioritizing product features. Helping us is someone who’s been prioritizing customer feedback professionally since 2001. His name is Kareem Mayan, and he is a co-founder at Savio, a company that simplifies collecting, organizing, and acting on customer feedback . He is a serial entrepreneur and previously a product manager and software developer. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers Tell us about your 5-step process for prioritizing product feature requests. Prioritization is as much art as it is science. This framework lets you narrow down a big list of features, but there’s still a lot of art involved in the process. [7:07] Step 1: Get Clear on your business goals I see teams struggle when they’re not clear on what the company is trying to accomplish. If you have a clear business goal—like increasing expansion, reducing churn, or increasing conversion—it becomes a lot easier to narrow down your feature candidates. Often, I see leadership not giving clear direction to the product team about what to build. [9:52] Step 2: Filter the feature requests based on what your most important customers want If your goal is to win more deals, identify the feature-related reasons your sales team lost deals in the past. If your goal is to reduce churn, look at what features your current customers asked for that you didn’t build. Use a tool like Savio or a spreadsheet to process your data; it should take you seconds to find the information you need. [12:54] Step 3: Prioritize further by other attributes that matter Once you’ve identified your business goal and broad set of features, you should sub-segment your features. Look at the features requested by a segment of customers you’re interested in. If we’re trying to reduce churn, we might want to see which features our ideal customer profile (ICP) requested. Or if we want to reduce churn in our enterprise plan segment or our European customer base, we look at features requested by customers in those segments. For example, we’ve had customers in Europe who have churned because they wanted our tool in their language. If we wanted to expand in the European market, we could build a feature to solve this problem and expand our market. [21:12] Step 4: Determine your development budget Decide among the three buckets you could spend your development budget on: new features, strategic features, or tech debt. This isn’t an exact process; decide roughly what percentage of your development budget to spend on each bucket. We like to say, “Spend your devs wisely.” Understand how much you want to spend on each feature. Talk to the development team and figure out where they’re confident and which parts aren’t finished. Use time as an estimate; if a feature is only worth one week to you instead of two, figure out how you can make it cheaper and faster to get it tested sooner. [25:05] Step 5: Choose the features and confirm with other stakeholders Many stakeholders like sales, customer success, development, and the CEO will be interested in your proposed list of features. Instead of sharing the features for the next cycle to all of them at once, share your list with each stakeholder one-on-one and talk about their concerns. Then when you get in the room with everybody to approve the features, all the objections will have been addressed in the less contentious one-on-one environment. Use customer feedback to back up your decisions. Ask questions and have conversations about the data and what customers are asking for to get folks on your side. Use the phrase “not right now” and share data to head off conflict. Action Guide: Put the information Kareem shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links: Read Kareem’s article about prioritizing product features Learn about Savio Connect with Kareem on LinkedIn Check out Kareem’s consulting work Innovation Quote “Innovation, not invention.” – David Cancel, CEO of Drift Thanks! Thank you for being an Everyday Innovator and learning with me from the successes and failures of product innovators, managers, and developers. If you enjoyed the discussion, help out a fellow product manager by sharing it using the social media buttons you see below. Source

The process of creating ideas – for product managers Today we are talking about the 7 habits of creative people. For such a discussion, we need a truly creative person, and that is why Nathan Phillips is with us. He is cofounder of Technology, Humans And Taste (THAT). Nathan leads the development of a proprietary collaborative methodology, which invites diverse and unfamiliar collaborators to co-create innovative concepts, leveraging AI to supercharge ideas.  He’s also a best-selling author and Emmy award winner, on top of it all! Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [7:06] You’ve identified seven habits of creative people. Where did those habits come from? I focus on teachable methodologies for collaboration and creativity. People often think creativity is a magic power that only some people have. Everyone is creative, but sometimes we lack the vocabulary to understand how to build an idea. Building ideas is like math—once you figure out how to construct an idea, all you need to do is slot ingredients into that process and watch as innovative original ideas emerge. People think ideas have to be good, but that’s anti-creative; you can’t know if an idea is good until it’s executed. Our process, which inspired the seven rules of creativity, is designed to be understandable by anybody and inclusive of anybody’s participation. It celebrates the fact that you have to have lots of ideas to have a good idea. [8:48] What are the seven rules for creativity? [10:55] #1 Don’t eat with your hands Always have a writing utensil. If you can’t capture your thinking, you’re left without that idea. As my wife Victoria Wellman says, if you have an idea and don’t say it, it doesn’t exist. Don’t write in your phone because word processors and notes are designed to make lists, but beautiful ideas don’t happen in order. A piece of paper and pen allow you to express the creative data point that happened in your head, however it comes out. Writing makes you remember things and think differently. Personally I use pen, not pencil, because when you write with pen you’re locked into it and reminded that what you’re doing has value. [14:11] #2 Art is dead If you want to be a creator, listen to music you don’t love and find out what you could love about it. Don’t go to museums to be inspired; you’ll just see what’s been done before. Instead, go to a place least like a museum and find something that belongs in a museum.  Approach the world from the perspective of someone who’s creatively engaged and trying to discover their own way of seeing. [16:32] #3 Keep it Kanye The idea of protecting your creativity is anti-creative. Always show your work. In an office, mandate that people show their work at the end of the day. If you’re sitting in a bar and thinking about a half-baked, great idea, tell someone about it and practice pitching it. If they can steal it, it wasn’t a good idea, but if they respond to it, you’ve got something original that’s yours to run with. It’s risky, but there’s nothing to be afraid of with sharing your work. [20:44] #4 Save your trash Author Stephen King threw away the first chapter of his first novel, but his wife pulled it out of the trash and he finished it, launching an incredibly impactful career. Reimagine your process through the lens of what you throw away. Look at what you’ve thrown away and connect those disparate data points. Your great concept or product is hiding in your trash, because you probably threw it away before you knew what you were doing. [23:30] #5 The Tina Turner Principle: We never do anything nice and easy There are tools that help you have ideas fast, but we need tools that help you have ideas slower. You have an idea by increasing friction, challenge, work, and disruption. You have to make it hard for yourself. If you’re making it easy, you’re skipping the creative part. [25:11] #6 Worship Satan: Religious imagination Use the power of make-believe to solve problems. When you approach a task where no solutions are available, come up with a story with a solution in it. That solution could be magic, from outer space, or something you completely invent. Then ask, How can I make this real? This is how you can get incredibly innovative solutions to problems everyone else is leaving on the floor. [28:34] #7 Create a code One of the most exciting parts of being a writer or creator is seeing people reading or using your stuff. You realize all the weird stuff bouncing around in your head is really useful to people when you bring it to life. They’re treating your crazy ideas like they’re normal. Instead of waiting for that, when you stumble on a new phrase that makes sense to you, codify it. Name a sketch you put on the wall and eventually people will start referring to it by the name you gave it, and it will become a useful tool. Put the information Nathan shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful link: Learn more about Technology, Humans And Taste (THAT) Innovation Quote “Rice is great if you’re really hungry and want to eat two thousand of something.” – Mitch Hedberg  Thanks! Thank you for being an Everyday Innovator and learning with me from the successes and failures of product innovators, managers, and developers. If you enjoyed the discussion, help out a fellow product manager by sharing it using the social media buttons you see below. Source