Product Mastery Now for Product Managers, Leaders, and Innovators

The truth about product managers’ common misconceptions Today we are talking about what may sound like fundamentals of product management, but many product managers have misconceptions about these key topics.  To help us with this is Grant Hunter, who co-founded with Steve Johnson a peer community and coaching group called Product Growth Leaders. I’ve been a participant in the community for a few months, and recently I noticed Grant posting articles on key topics that will help you as well. Grant is a product coach and strategy advisor who helps companies and product organizations get more market-focused in their products and strategies. Previously, he was a trainer at Pragmatic Marketing. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [5:40] What is a product? A product is a solution for a person’s problem, including all the components necessary to fully solve that problem for the personas who experience the product. You need to understand the problem of the specific persona you’re marketing to. Customers think of their entire experience, including buying the product and any support they talk to, as part of the product. [9:47] Do you make a distinction between new product work (sometimes called innovation) and current product work? Innovation is about creating value. In the lifecycle curve, if you’re not always adding incremental new value, you’ve plateaued and are not innovating. You can add new value through continuous innovation (adding more value within your current products’ lifecycles) or discontinuous innovation (new products or technology). You use the same processes to make a new product or a new version of a product. It’s all innovation and adding value to a customer. [14:45] How do you think about personas? A persona is someone with the same need and same value profile. Many of us have the same problem, but we don’t have the same value profile. The persona identifies motivation. Think about your customers and what they value and are willing to pay more for. For example, my wife and I will pay more for an electrician who is neat and cleans up afterward. We have a persona for a product that is clean and organized. Our persona is built around our value profile and what’s important to us in our experience with the product. Personas help you understand people’s value profiles and motivations and why they’re making their decisions. Many organizations try to make a product for everyone. They have a product that will help you save and share photos, and they say it’s for everyone who takes pictures, but no one is going to find their product. Instead, they could make it specifically for first-time moms sharing pictures of their new babies, and once they figure that out, they can go on to the next market site. In the bowling pin approach, knock over one pin first, then figure out where to go next. [19:27] How do you determine if a new feature is valuable to your customers? The Kano model helps you determine if a new feature is valuable to customers, ignored by customers, or distracting to customers. You can only understand the customer’s value equation by going out and listening to them. They’re the only ones who understand and know it. You can’t prioritize features based on your own hypotheses or assumptions. You must use data in the market and conversations with customers. [25:35] What is product management? Product management is management of the product. That means increasing value to the company and the market. Product management is the role that makes sure you’re always doing the right thing. Every company has more ideas than resources. Clayton Christensen found that three out of four new product initiatives never make it to market or never turn a profit. Product management needs to make sure you do the right things and aren’t trying to be all things to all people. Understand the persona; their problems, value equations, and motivations; and your differentiation. Align the persona and market with your differentiation and product. Product managers also create value for the team. Everybody wants to work on a winner product, and it can be demoralizing to work on an end-of-life product. Product managers may need to make the decision to sunset the product and start on the next product. Product managers think about value for the customer, the company, and the team. Action Guide: Put the information Grant shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links: Join Grant Hunter and Steve Johnson’s free community of Product Growth Leaders Read articles from Grant and Steve Innovation Quote “Marketing…is the whole business seen from the point of view of its final result, that is, from the customer’s point of view.” – Peter Drucker  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

How product managers can gain influence, solve problems, and propel their organizations to success What would you do if you were the first product hire in a rapidly growing company? Our guest, Kenton Hansen, was in that position at Roll20 three years ago. The company now has more than 9 million users on its platform, providing the best of tabletop gaming in an online environment. Kenton is now the Product Director at Roll20, and over the last three years, he has built the product management and UX processes and teams the company uses. We’ll talk about what that journey was like and what he has learned. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [1:34] What was going on at Roll20 that caused leadership to hire their first product person? It was a time of targeted growth, and leadership was excited about growing the platform. The business had already grown significantly, and we had just announced our 3 millionth user. There was a product vacuum as one of the co-founders was becoming CEO, and development management was moving out of product into more technical aspects. I was happy to come in and provide support across the organization to make sure growth could happen. [4:08] What were your first few months like, bringing a product management process to the organization? I treated the position as a consultancy role. I talked to a lot of people and wrote down the problems people shared with me. I learned product knowledge and understood the vastness of the company and the various customers you might never think about. We’ve been a virtual company from the beginning, and that virtual environment is challenging and interesting. You have to be more targeted in understanding how other people contribute. After understanding the problems that needed to be solved and the flow of business, revenue, and innovation, I started a punch list of the main problems. I took an approach based on the three horizons model, and focused on accomplishing innovation in horizon one, which is everyday iteration. I focused on how we could deliver features and projects to our users immediately and how we needed to change our process. [7:08] How did you get to know people and problems in a virtual environment? I tried to listen more than I spoke or type less than I read in an online chat. I wanted to internalize the happenings in the organization, and I started to see people’s characters and personalities emerge. Quick coffee chats or volunteering for simple tasks to work alongside others was effective, especially in a small organization. [8:49] What were some of the main problems you discovered, and what did you do about them? I knew our goal was massive growth and scaling, and the punch list to get the product process organized was a small part of the larger goal. I understood that what got us here (the growth we had already seen) was not going to get us there (to more massive growth). I relied on other members of the team to help me create new processes and get some work off my plate. Our strategies and philosophies needed to change to accommodate the stage we were in then and the stages I expected in the future. [10:37] How did your level of real authority compare to your level of gained influence? The authority given to me was not enough to make effective changes, so I knew I needed to show I could handle myself. Volunteering for tasks with others is the best way to build trust. Everyone is going to make mistakes, and showing up for mistakes as much as for successes is key. Great product people understand you share victory and you carry defeat yourself. Influence is gained in small, intimate settings. [13:47] As you were trying to scale dramatically, what was wrong with the processes in place? We needed to understand that pre-optimization is waste. I could have designed a process and slammed it through the organization, but baked into that are assumptions about how the world will change. No one would have been able to pre-optimize a feature roadmap for 2020, because no one knew how the world was going to change. Instead, I focused on solving the problems that were emerging at the time, trying to understand the next problems, and preparing possible solutions. [15:41] How did you avoid constant firefighting (focusing only on what is urgent at the time) rather than putting processes in place for the future? Our leadership team was great at helping us distinguish between an actual fire and a perceived fire using key performance indicators and standard operating objectives. We re-approached how we expect to see change happen within our organization to solve the problems that keep coming up over and over again. Our CEO, Nolan Jones, says, “It’s fine to have 100 problems every quarter. We just want them to be 100 different problems.” [17:21] What were some of the actions you took to solve problems? We needed to change the way we listened to our community. Our community has been crucial to Roll20. People like the software and become part of the community in an amazing way. From the beginning, our product research was heavily influenced by our community. As we grew, we had to start soliciting additional feedback and listening to it in a different way. Someone who’s willing to type their opinion on the internet has a strong opinion, and those are good, but we also want to get the opinions of people who aren’t ready to expose their thoughts and feelings. We have to seek out those opinions. The most vocal people in the community may not represent the majority. [19:41] Is there any other key problem you’d like to highlight? Hiring was a big challenge. Unless you have an infinite budget, hiring is always a compromise. You always have to coach new hires and bring them to the level where they can add to the organization in a great way. [23:38] Do you have any additional advice for a product professional stepping into an organization with immature product management processes? Like I’ve said before, listen more than you talk, read more than you type, connect with individuals, and build allies. As a product person, know that smaller is bigger. It might be fun and exciting to reach for the stars, and you definitely can, but you have to build a launch pad before you take off. Action Guide: Put the information Kenton shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links: Checkout Roll20’s website and blog Learn more about Kenton on his blog Innovation Quote “They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.” – Andy Warhol 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

Skills for product managers to deeply understand customers’ problems and goals Today we are talking about how to understand what provides value to customers by giving them what they need to solve a problem or complete a task. Clayton Christensen described this as the job to be done. It is a topic our guest, David Duncan, knows well, as he co-wrote the Jobs-to-be-Done book Competing Against Luck with Clayton Christensen and has more recently written The Secret Lives of Customers: A Detective Story About Solving the Mystery of Customer Behavior. Dave is a managing director at Innosight, where he helps leaders of organizations create customer-centric teams and innovation strategies. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:05] How did your experience earning your PhD in physics equip you for your current work in innovation? I studied physics because I was fascinated by the subject and motivated by a desire to understand things deeply. Later, I moved into business and now work at Innosight, where we help companies figure out how to innovate more effectively. My background in physics helped me become a better problem solver and a better and more quantitative thinker. It gave me literacy in technology-related topics that enabled me to understand what different companies do. Science and engineering are at the heart of a lot of great innovation. [4:00] What does your new book The Secret Lives of Customers add to Jobs-to-be-Done knowledge? One of my goals was to create a broadly accessible book. The Secret Lives of Customers teaches anyone in any role in any organization the concepts, tools, and techniques they need to understand customers confidently. I put Jobs-to-be-Done in the broader context of the problem it solves—effectively understanding customers. Another goal was to assert the approach to JTBD I and others at Innosight have learned and developed over the years. The book also includes some new tools and frameworks including how to apply Jobs in strategy, as well as product development and innovation. [7:18] Tell us about your book’s narrative format. The Secret Lives of Customers is a fictional detective story. One of the main characters is a market detective who tries to understand customers in market investigations. The reader learns about the tools and techniques he’s using. This format was much more fun to write, and I hope it’s more fun and engaging to read. It’s best to learn to understand customers by watching someone have a conversation with them, reflecting on what you observe, trying it yourself, and getting feedback. [10:51] Why should product managers think of themselves as market detectives? In the story, I use market detective to describe a person who is aspiring to understand customers. The book emphasizes one-on-one customer conversations, which is the foundation of all other customer research techniques. One-on-one interviews are often the most valuable technique you can use and almost always relevant to every use case. They enable product managers to hear directly from customers, develop products that are more connected with their jobs-to-be-done, and develop features that reflect an understanding of not just their functional jobs but also their emotional and social jobs. You can make better prioritization decisions about which products to work on and minimize the temptation to be product-led rather than customer-led. [13:08] As market detectives, what are the three competencies we need to have to put Jobs-to-be-Done in place? You need to learn a language, a method, and a mindset to confidently understand customers. Almost every discipline has its own vocabulary, but surprisingly there isn’t a standard, widely accessible language that guides interactions with customers. We need a language that guides us to ask the right questions that lead to the right insights at the right level of detail. The right questions are those that help you understand what really matters to customers—their problems, their goals, and the jobs they want to get done. Once you have the language to ask the right questions, you need a method for discovering, organizing, and interpreting that information. The core thought process for understanding customers includes four questions: What are the customers’ circumstances? What are their jobs-to-be-done? What are they doing today to accomplish their jobs? How do they evaluate quality solutions for those jobs? Finally, you need the right mindset to apply the language and method. Be genuinely interested in the person you’re talking with. Be authentic and willing to share some of yourself in the conversation. Go into the conversations with a beginner’s mind—set your assumptions aside and be receptive to being surprised. [18:24] Can you share an example of using the right language to understand the job the customer is trying to accomplish? The Secret Lives of Customers is set in a coffee shop, which people hire for diverse jobs. A student goes to the coffee shop after class to do homework. A travelling businessperson uses the wifi at the coffee shop to send emails. Other people hire the coffee shop to socialize, meet new people, take a break, or treat themselves. The power of the Jobs lens is that it shines a light on the nuances of those different jobs. [24:28] Tell us more about the method. The method is not a list of questions you should ask. Rather, it helps you focus on what you’re trying to learn in the conversation. Be interested in people and curious about them and their problem. People get wrapped up in apprehension about customer interviews, but it’s far better to just go talk to someone than to overprepare and worry. When you have a conversation, you need to recognize when you learn something useful. The method helps you distinguish between questions you’re trying to answer and questions you’re going to ask. You’re trying to answer questions like, What are their jobs-to-be-done? What circumstances in their lives influence those jobs? How do they think about current solutions for those jobs? You don’t have to ask them those questions, but be alert to that information as you have a conversation. The best customer conversations are a series of prompts to get the conversation going, rather than a Q&A. With the compass of what you want to learn, you can lead the conversation to whatever you’re trying to accomplish. [28:16] Tell us more about the beginner’s mind and how it applies to JTBD. The beauty of Jobs-to-be-Done is that is forces you to have a beginner’s mind. It decouples you from the solution you’re selling and orients you toward the customers’ concerns, problems, and goals. Action Guide: Put the information Dave shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links: Learn more on Dave’s website, MarketDetective.com Check out The Secret Lives of Customers on Amazon Connect with Dave on LinkedIn or Twitter Learn more about Innosight at Innosight.com Innovation Quote “Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.” – Winston Churchill  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

Learn what sets successful product management teams apart Today we are talking about a recent study that gives us insights into what’s going on in product management and product management teams. For several years, our guest has conducted the Study of Product Team Performance. The one for this year was rather different as it reflected on the impact of the COVID Pandemic, which we’ll get into in just a moment. Returning with us is Greg Geracie the CEO of Actuation Consulting, a global provider of product management training, consulting, and advisory services to some of the world’s most well-known organizations. I’ve known Greg for several years, as we both volunteer with PDMA, the Product Development and Management Association. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:08] What is the purpose of the Study of Product Team Performance and how was it different this year? The study researches the factors that differentiate successful product teams from the rest of the pack. This year, we focused on the impact of COVID-19 on the performance of product teams. Our goal was to capture what we’ve learned from the pandemic and help our clients and followers better understand its impact on product team performance, so they can make better-informed decisions in the future. [3:45] What types of companies and industries participated in the study? Companies of all shapes and sizes from around the world participate in our research. For this study: 49% of survey respondents work in the technology industry 22% in the services industry 13% in consumer products 4% in education 1% in government 11% in other industries The revenue of survey respondents varied: 35% of our respondents worked for companies with revenue less than $50 million 37% worked for companies with revenue between $50 million and $2 billion 28% worked for companies with revenue over $2 billion Additionally, over 55% of our respondents were product managers, which was a larger percentage than in the past. [5:54] What highlights would you like to share about the study? [5:54] Remote-first mindset We discovered four key findings. First, survey respondents espoused a remote-first mindset. They believed their organization should be designed with a remote-first mentality and operating structure. Respondents described their organizations as rigid and against remote work, but during the pandemic they saw how working from home could be highly effective. They saw that COVID had changed the mentality of organizations in a way that wouldn’t have happened otherwise, and the lesson many people learned is that organizations need to perpetually experiment with remote technology and collaboration tools before a pandemic or other event forces change. Remote working does not extend equally to all industries. Education, academics, and financial services lead the way in transitioning to remote work, while food service, retail, and construction were the lowest adopters. Respondents shared challenges that come with remote working. Internet connectivity was a problem for many. Process documentation and onboarding of new employees were challenges. Feelings of alienation and perceived lack of empathy from executives contributed to reduced productivity. Nineteen percent of employees struggled with being effective while working remotely, and many dealt with the loss of family members from COVID. Organizations need to keep in mind the impact of the pandemic on their employees at a personal level. [10:03] Importance of strategy Organizations with a clear view of their strategy found it easier to successfully pivot during the pandemic. In every study, we’ve found that strategy correlates with higher performance on product teams. This year, organizations were pivoting their business strategy, not just their product strategy. Surprisingly, respondents were very upbeat and positive. One respondent shared, “Extraordinary situations are extraordinary opportunities.” Many organizations reprioritized their investments, shored up their strategy, and emphasized virtual products and passive income streams. [12:43] Planning for future adverse events There’s a heightened awareness of future disruptive events, and many respondents believe their organizations failed to effectively plan for adverse events, and they want to see this corrected. Respondents anticipate future crises and welcome more planning in advance of the next crisis. Specifically, they would like to see business continuity plans, increased contingency and scenario planning, and the development of special teams to deal with future crises more effectively. [14:21] Flexible culture necessary to thrive Respondents cited a need for a flexible, agile, entrepreneurial mindset. The status quo has been upended, and we need to be flexible in order to thrive in this environment. Respondents pointed out that organizations need to evaluate which organizational activities should cease. One employee said, “Everything plus more is not a strategy nor is it sustainable.” During the pandemic, many organizations started new activities but did not stop old activities, and that made them inefficient and stressed. There’s only so much employees can handle, so organizations need to remove activities as they add new activities. [17:21] What role do you think remote work will play in the future? The majority of survey respondents would prefer to work from home indefinitely, but I think most employees will end up in a hybrid environment in the future, working from home two or three days a week and working in the office two or three days a week. In the study, we learned that customer engagement and discovery were the areas of product management most impacted by remote work. Forty percent of survey respondents cited those areas as the biggest current challenge in product development. [22:01] What are some tips for thriving in a remote work or hybrid environment? These tips come from Nick DiLisi, CEO of eMoneyAdvisor. Change your default meeting time from one hour to 45 minutes to enable breaks and relieve mental exhaustion, particularly between online meetings. Be patient with employees working from home with families. Record meetings for those unable to attend so everyone is on the same page. Don’t forget to say thank you—send thoughtful gifts to employees, appreciate their extra efforts, and express empathy for what they’re going through. Action Guide: Put the information Greg shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links: Check out Greg’s website, ActuationConsulting.com Download the latest Study of Product Team Performance for free Innovation Quote “Crisis is the great revealer.” – Simon Sinek 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

Tips for product managers to communicate so people remember We are about to have an important discussion on how to communicate in a way that makes people remember what is important. That is communicating to influence others and build networks to help you accomplish your product objectives. Helping us do that is our guest, Tina Frey Clements. She believes that a company’s success is directly related to the engagement of its people. She excels at moving businesses forward and motivating and growing talent. Her experience has been in many areas but has emphasized the automotive industry, with treks at BMW, Volkswagen, and Mini.  Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [1:41] You help people become better communicators and facilitators. What do you mean by facilitation? When you’re facilitating a message, it has nothing to do with you and everything to do with your recipient, the learner. The job of a facilitator is to present the information and get out of the way of the learner and let them learn. [3:49] What should we try to accomplish as facilitators? First you have to define your specific goal. Usually, a product manager’s goal is to communicate knowledge. A specific goal might be communicating with a retail store so you can sell something or communicating with marketing so they can promote your product. Second, remember that whomever you’re communicating with doesn’t necessarily communicate like you. We typically communicate in the way we like to be communicated to, but that rarely works. Figure out how your audience needs to hear your information and communicate so that they are hearing it and retaining it. [9:21] How do we help our audience remember, retain, and apply? That’s not easy. Once you’ve acknowledged that not everyone learns like you do, the next step is identifying the learning style of the person you’re communicating with. Some examples of learning styles are visual, auditory, reading/writing, intellectual, and kinesthetic. Tailor your communication to your audience’s learning style. For a visual learner, use visual aids. For an auditory learner, ask them to repeat back what they understood. If you’re communicating to a big group, script your message to reach all of them. Always leave your audience with an action item. [15:18] How else can we better communicate? If possible, be interactive. Use the 80:20 rule—20% of your communication should be teaching the information and 80% should be your audience figuring it out on their own. For people to act, they have to create their own thought about the topic. Interaction is the critical element to engage the audience. Even if you’re in a formal setting behind a podium, you can encourage interaction by asking people to answer questions or raise their hands. Always invite people to ask you questions afterward. [24:29] How can product managers focus on solving the customer problem? We often focus on our solution instead of listening to customers. We need to prioritize learning about the customer problem. Without knowing your customers’ real problems, you’ll never be successful. [28:07] How can we partner with others to be successful in our communication? Focus on what you’re really good at and partner with others who complement your strengths. If you know everything about your product, but you’re not good at selling it, partner with someone who is. If you don’t want to partner with someone, change your behavior to communicate better. Don’t fake it so much that you lose who you really are, but take action to build relationships. [31:42] How do you use story to make your communication more effective? Be transparent, vulnerable, and relatable. This will make your audience want to hear you and trust you. When you can, use story. Everyone loves and can relate to a story. You could share a personal story about your journey with the product. You can use stories to engage all types of leaners. Action Guide: Put the information Tina shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links: Check out Tina’s book, The Art of Facilitation: Communicate So They Remember Visit Tina’s website, RPCAmerica.com Look out for Tina’s new book, Fantastic Facilitation Fails Innovation Quote “If you can predict it, you can prepare for it.” – Unknown 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 tool to help product managers understand what features customers value Today we are talking about conjoint analysis, which is a tool you can use to make informed decisions about what customers value and what they will pay for. If you have to make decisions about what features to include in a new product or the next version of a product, what price to charge for a product, or what the impact on market share will be by introducing a new product, then this discussion is for you. To learn about Conjoint Analysis, we are talking with Patty Yanes, a market researcher who has led numerous research projects that resulted in new insights about customers and a deeper understanding of their needs. Patty is with Applied Marketing Science (AMS), a firm dedicated to helping product managers with market research. AMS was founded by an MIT professor and is well respected for the work it does. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [1:49] What kind of problems does Conjoint Analysis solve? Conjoint Analysis is the industry standard for understanding the features to include in a product. It helps you find out how much people are willing to pay and is the best way to figure out pricing. [2:56] What are some other tools similar to Conjoint Analysis? Van Westendorp: a quicker and easier but less reliable method of pricing Gabor Granger: another pricing test Max/Diff (maximum difference scaling): a method of ranking features without considering price Turf Analysis: a method to understand which bundle of features will allow you to reach the most customers [5:29] Take us through an example of Conjoint. Let’s take the example of a pair of headphones. First, we must make sure we have the right inputs. Inputs that affect the customers’ decision to purchase the headphones are: brand, how it fits on the ear, whether it’s wireless or noise-cancelling, and the microphone. You’ll also need to determine your price, which could vary from $20 to $500. [7:54] How does segmentation fit in? Segmentation can be part of the process of designing your study or it can be part of cutting the data on the back-end to see how the results vary. For instance, you might create two separate studies for two different headphones, one for gamers and one for audiophiles. Or if you want to develop just one product that you will market differently to different segments, you would design one study with all the attributes and then cut on the back-end to see what’s more important to a gamer vs. an audiophile. [9:27] What’s the next step in Conjoint Analysis? Make sure you’re talking to the right people. You need a significant sample size including all the people who are part of the decision to purchase your product. We recommend 300 people, with a minimum of 100 per segment. Once we’ve designed our Conjoint study, we pre-test our survey. We talk to people in the field to make sure they’re understanding our survey and we’re understanding their answers. [12:23] How do you recruit and incentivize study participants? We use research panels that are already in existence. The incentives may have to be quite high since people’s time is valuable. Scrappy solutions include talking to customers in a store or reaching out to friends and family. [15:29] Tell us more about the pre-test. We recruit a small sample of the same type of people who would be taking our general survey and run through the survey with them. We ask them questions to discover what assumptions they’re making about the survey and whether they understand the survey in the way we expect. [17:35] How do we field the study? We go into the field with a panel, send the survey out, and get the data back. Then, before analysis, we clean the data, making sure everyone paid attention appropriately and that we have the right people who will give relevant answers. [19:36] What do we do with the data? There are many different ways you can analyze the data, and today almost all of them can be done with software. The industry standard for Conjoint software is Sawtooth Software. First, perform a regression to see what’s most important to people. We use the hierarchical Bayes regression, but there are many different options. The regression equation tells you what’s driving the overall purchase decision for the product. This allows you to look at which features are more and less important. Next calculate willingness-to-pay for each feature. For example, we could look at willingness-to-pay for two different types of noise cancellation. [24:20] What kind of questions would we ask in the survey to determine which features are more important? Conjoint is all about simulating choices and tradeoffs people are making. You present survey participants with three to five option of different headphones that all have different attributes and different prices, and you ask them to select the one they prefer. You repeat this about 12 times with different combinations, and the software determines which features are most valuable. [27:08] How do you choose which combinations to put in the survey? We avoid putting in combinations that don’t ever happen. For example, noise-cancelling headphones probably can’t be feather-light. However, you might still want to include them in the study so that if the technology becomes available in the future, you have information about whether customers are interested. [29:45] How do we choose which prices to include in our survey? We present different buckets of pricing. The different products vary by seven or eight different price levels. One pair of headphones has noise cancellation and costs $60, and another does not have noise cancellation but costs $40. The customer decides how much it’s worth to them. Useful links: Learn more about Applied Market Science Check out the AMS blog Connect with Patty and AMS on Twitter Connect with Patty on LinkedIn Learn more about Sawtooth Software for Conjoint Analysis Innovation Quote “The customer’s perception is your reality.” – Kate Zabriskie   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

How product managers can use data to understand customers and create value Today we are talking about making better product decisions that create customer value using the data you already have. A PR person contacted me about a company that received the 2021 Products That Count award in the Operate category. The award recognizes products that help product managers and are pushing for better ways to accomplish work now and in the future. The company is Indicative and they help product managers leverage insights based on data already in their data warehouse, build their product roadmap, optimize user engagement, and reduce churn. I’m interested in learning more about this area in general because it brings together several important aspects of product management—the customer journey, data science, data-driven decision making, and reduced time to market. Our guest is Jeremy Levy, the CEO of Indicative. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:00] What problem in product management drew you toward your work with Indicative? Our mission at Indicative is to help businesses build better products through data. The first company I founded provided location-based dating for iPhone and Android, and my second company was the first mobile-based CRM for enterprise. In these companies, we struggled with leveraging the data we collected from our customers in a cohesive way for our product teams to make informed product decisions. We created Indicative, the only product analytics platform build specifically for modern data infrastructure. Indicative allows product teams to easily synthesize and use information and ask thousands of questions about their product, roadmap, or day-to-day decisions. [5:36] What is a data warehouse? A data warehouse is a repository of a company’s business data. It’s separate from a traditional transactional database that runs your application. The data warehouse keeps your data in one place and allows the rest of the company to easily interface with the data. Data warehouses have become available easily and inexpensively; now a startup has access to the same hardware as a Fortune 500 company. [9:02] How can we do a better job creating products for customers using data? Can you take us through an example? One example is Prezi, which makes virtual presentation software. Customers don’t use their products in a linear flow; there’s an infinite number of journeys the customer could take when they use the product. Any manual analysis of those journeys is impossible, so Prezi built a data warehouse to collect and store all their data. Using our platform, they isolated the individual journeys customers take as they create presentations. They found friction, the most effective paths, and the features that people were and were not using. Understanding the nuances of how people use their products allowed Prezi to better understand their users and inform their roadmap to reduce friction and help people create better presentations faster. [12:24] When you brought Prezi onboard, did you instrument their product to collect data, or was there already data available for you to leverage? Prezi already had their own data. This is often the case. Companies retain ownership of their data and use a variety of available tools to collect and analyze data, storing it in a single data warehouse. Storing data in a single warehouse makes data collection and analysis safer, more reliable, and less expensive. [17:25] How do customer journeys help us make better products? Customer journeys include all the paths that customers take when they interact with your product and all the touchpoints like email, registration, and phone calls. We created a product called Journeys that visualizes many possible journeys and allows you to filter the ones that are most effective and visualize them with a Sankey diagram, which is a diagram that branches out like a tree showing the possible paths on a customer journey. Analyzing customer journeys helps us reduce friction in the product experience and allow customers to interact with the product as effectively, pleasantly, and delightfully as possible. [23:36] What are other benefits of making better use of data? Once you start thinking about product management using data, you start looking for opportunities to leverage data in your roadmap. That leads you to use the scientific method. You come up with a hypothesis about your product and use data to prove it. [26:41] Who helps get the data into a data warehouse? When data warehouses were technical and expensive, engineering teams or data teams put data into data warehouses, but now as data warehouses are becoming easier to use, product teams are doing this. It makes so much sense because product teams are the ones who use the data. More and more, data is being thought of as part of product. Action Guide: Put the information Jeremy shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links: Learn more about Indicative Listen to Jeremy’s Deciding by Data podcast Connect with Jeremy on LinkedIn Innovation Quote “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” –  attributed to Henry Ford  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

Pipeline, Process, and Practice for Product Managers This is the Product Mastery Now podcast. For seven years it was called The Everyday Innovator, but I recently changed the name to better reflect our mission, which is to help you become a Product Master, creating products customers love. A common question I am asked is, How can an organization speed up its product development? One way is what our guest is sharing with us today, the 3 Ps of Lean Product Development—Pipeline, Practice, and Process. His name is Steve Stucky, and he has over 25 years of experience applying lean product development.  Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [1:20] What is Lean Product Development? Lean Product Development is about putting in place the best processes to make better products faster. It’s about eliminating waste in processes, making teams more effective, and aligning the organization. [2:56] Why are organizations incorporating Lean Product Development? Lean Product Development gets products that meet all the customer needs out the door quicker, without having to work harder. Lean Product Development helps developers spend more time on value-added work instead of wasteful work. [5:18] How can an organization use Lean Product Development? Lean Product Development is a holistic approach to improving product development, looking at: Pipeline—communicating priorities and aligning the organization so it isn’t overloaded Process—the lean product development process itself Practice—how the team works together [6:50] Pipeline The Pipeline allows leadership to communicate a ranked list of priorities. The top projects are the focus, and when we run out of resources, the lower priority projects are placed on hold. Top projects get the maximum effort and get done sooner. The Pipeline includes the optimal number of projects for people to be most effective and spend more time doing value-added work—usually two or three projects. [11:28] Process Process focuses on improving two main areas of the new product development process itself. First, find the waste, wait time, and bottlenecks in the process. Second, make sure development teams have the flexibility to reduce the number of deliverables on their plate to manage the work that’s important for the teams. A Kaizen approach finds bottlenecks and looks at the wait time versus the actual work time. Identify and remove bottlenecks and speed everything up. [13:40] Practice Several best practices can help improve the speed and effectiveness of project teams. One is using Agile with Scrum, taking the best of both practices. Teams meet frequently and communicate, and the vision and work are visualized using Scrum. Facilitated acceleration events are also impactful. A Market Requirements Event prioritizes product requirements in one to three days, rather than the months this process usually takes. The Market Requirements Event involves customer-facing people like sales and marketing, and it’s led by product management with developers and engineers present. You discuss customer needs and competitive threats and identify the key features customers will value in a product. You categorize and prioritize to develop products with maximum differentiation and value, and you align the group around the important requirements. Another event is PARM (Project And Risk Mitigation). This is an 8-hour event in which the team builds a project schedule, compresses it, comes back with a date they feel they can meet confidently, and then identifies risks and prioritizes the highest risks for mitigation. Rapid Learning Cycles are another great risk reduction opportunity. The team identifies unknowns and focuses on key decisions the team should make and the knowledge gaps they need to close to make those decisions. Rapid Learning Cycles can also be used for putting together a project. In a two- to four-week cycle, you start with a hypothesis and learn more to expose assumptions and help you make the right decisions. Action Guide: Put the information Steve shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links: Connect with Steve on LinkedIn Learn more about Steve’s Lean Program Consulting Ron Mascitelli’s Mastering Lean Product Development Norbert Majerus’s Lean-Driven Innovation Katherine Radika’s High Velocity Innovation Eric Reis’ Lean Startup Innovation Quote “You cannot discover new oceans unless you have the courage to lose sight of the shore.”    - Anonymous 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

How product managers can succeed in innovation leadership Welcome to the Product Mastery Now podcast. You may know it as The Everyday Innovator, but after seven years of interviews, I have changed the name to better reflect our mission, which is to help you become a Product Master, creating products customers love. Our guest today is a 30+ year innovation and technology journalist. He has authored several books on innovation and is the CEO and co-founder of Innovation Leader, which helps changemakers at large organizations deliver real impact. He’ll share the challenges innovation leaders are facing and how to overcome them.  Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:37] What are the biggest obstacles to innovation in organizations? Big companies are designed to be like aircraft carriers—everything is supposed be perfect, safe, and reliable. If you, as a product manager, are trying to make something new that’s not yet perfect, safe, and reliable, you face obstacles like: Politics and turf wars: people don’t want you getting in their way Cultural issues: changing the culture is challenging Inability to act: people know what signals are crucial to the future of your company but can’t act on them [6:52] How can organizations overcome those obstacles? One option is skunkworks—innovating in secret. There are successful examples of this, like the Apple Macintosh and Lockheed’s skunkworks that developed some of the fastest planes of the 20th century, but often skunkworks don’t get enough support from headquarters and are not attuned to the overall strategy. Innovation networks are more successful. People from organizations all over the world work together to build innovation capability. These networks are much harder to switch off than skunkworks. [10:19] What is the role of an innovation leader? Innovation leader is an incredibly challenging role. Innovation leaders work in established companies and are responsible for thinking about the future, talking to customers about the future, and understanding how technology is going to change. It’s a hard role because of the obstacles I already mentioned—people know how to do their jobs and they have numbers to hit, and innovators feel like agitators because they’re disturbing the status quo. [19:24] What actions do successful innovation leaders take, and how do you see innovation leadership changing in the future? First, innovation leaders need to find out what kind of innovation the organization wants them to be doing. There are three categories: Product/service innovation: innovating what you’re offering to customers Cultural innovation: changing the way it feels to work here and potentially attracting new talent Process innovation: internally-focused Successful innovation leaders know you can’t work on all three of those categories at once. Choose one or two and don’t spread yourself too thin. Successful innovation leaders create value for the organization in the near-term, mid-term, and long-term. Today, they might be hiring new talent, testing new technology, or finding new solutions for customer research in a remote world. Meanwhile, they’re balancing those activities with a mid-term and long-term approach to innovation. Innovation leadership is a job about people—understanding organizational politics and influencing people. [24:00] What are the biggest enablers of success for innovation? The top three are: Leadership support Ability to test, learn, and iterate Right strategy and vision Do you have a vision that is thinking about today, next year, and the next five years? Successful founders have a vision for the next five or ten years and know what they need to get there. Too often, companies collect ideas from their employees but don’t have a plan for doing anything with them, so people stop giving ideas. These companies are doing innovation theater, not true innovation. You need to think through the unintended consequences ahead of time and making sure you have a plan for managing any innovation processes you put in place. Action Guide: Put the information Scott shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links: Check out Innovation Leader Listen to the Innovation Answered podcast Connect with Scott and Innovation Leader on LinkedIn Connect with Scott on Twitter Innovation Quote “I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I’m frightened of the old ones.” – John Cage   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 tool to help product managers accomplish more Product improvements and product innovation too frequently suffer from accomplishing less than we want. The urgent is often in the way of the important. If you want to get the important work done more of the time, you’ll find OKRs (objectives and key results) helpful. Also, if you’ve tried OKRs and didn’t like them, this discussion will help you too. We need an OKR expert to learn more about this, and joining us is the woman who wrote the bestselling book, Radical Focus, that tackles the use of OKRs and startup culture with an eye to getting the right things done. Her name is Christina Wodtke, and she is a lecturer at Stanford, sharing insight into human innovation and high-performing teams. She has designed products with LinkedIn, Zynga, Yahoo! and many others, as well as founding three startups, and the online design magazine Boxes and Arrows. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [6:13] Why are OKRs (objectives and key results) important? OKRs are powerful for accomplishing important things that aren’t otherwise getting done. If a task is important and urgent, it always gets done, but sometimes the things that are unimportant but urgent get in the way of the things that are important but not urgent. OKRs give those important strategic projects a sense of urgency, scheduling them and helping you get them done. OKRs’ cadence causes you to touch them every Monday, when you commit activities toward your OKRs, and every Friday, when you celebrate progress. OKRs allow people to meet their goals. [13:27] What are the steps for putting OKRs into practice in a product team? Start using OKRs with a high-performing product team. Your objective should be inspiring. The key results can be hard to choose. Think about results that suggest you’re keeping your customers satisfied and committed to staying with you. For example, measure leads converted, renewals, or word-of-mouth referrals. Choose good, strong, honest signals of success. Don’t choose key results that you can make happen by doing them. Choose results that are in response to the activities you’re doing. At first you won’t know how many results to use; make a guess. Every Monday, everyone commits to doing something toward the OKR. In a healthy company with psychological safety, team members can ask each other, “Why are you doing that?” or “Do you really think that’s going to work?” On Fridays, celebrate progress. This is critical. Everyone shares what they’ve done during the week and how they’re progressing toward the OKRs. [19:59] What is an example of using OKRs? Suppose we have a small B2B company, and we want to grow, but we’re getting distracted from the real problems. We think we need a CRM, but before getting a CRM, the CEO says the OKRs for the next quarter should be around retaining current customer and turning leads into customers. Out of those, which is most important? Turning leads into customers is great, but if we can’t keep them, let’s focus on retention first. The CEO states the objective, using language of optimism and aspiration, “Our current customers feel so supported by our services and software that they eagerly sign up.” Next we figure out the key results, e.g., emails from customers saying thank you for the software. Next quarter we will choose new key results. Before trying something big and expensive like a CRM, we could start with a simpler solution like a single spreadsheet. Keep in mind that OKRs don’t do everything. They’re just a piece of the larger system of modern product management. [27:59] What’s the cadence of OKRs? The cadence depends on the needs of the company. If you’ve found product market fit and are looking to accelerate growth, you’ll have a different pace than if you’re looking to move into a new market. If you’re moving into a new market, run lots of experiments to test hypotheses. Choose key results that are strong, early indicators that you might have hit product market fit, then keep running lots of tests. At the end of the quarter, we have a formal closing of the quarter.  Focus on learning. Have a retrospective, see patterns, and note the hypotheses that moved your numbers. Talk about what kept you from meeting your goals. Then you can repeat or adjust your OKRs for the next quarter. [32:34] What is the timeframe for OKRs? I think that at large companies all missions are five-year objectives. For these companies, have annual OKRs, supported by quarterly objectives. For startups or intrepreneurs who want to move faster, use quarters (three months) for your OKRs. Six weeks is the smallest timeframe I would run an OKR in. [35:33] Would you like to share any other tips for implementing OKRs? A common mistake is setting up the OKRs and not following up with the weekly meetings. A bad or quickly written OKR that you have weekly meetings about will be significantly more successful than a perfect OKR that you never follow up on. Too many people use OKRs as product management. Get your product tasks in a pipeline. OKRs aren’t the magic silver bullet that will fix everything, but they are inspiring and motivating to get teams on the same page. Action Guide: Put the information Christina shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links: Learn more about Christina and OKRs at cwodtke.com or eleganthack.com Check out Radical Focus and The Team that Managed Itself on Amazon Innovation Quote “When you are tired of saying it, people are just starting to hear it.” – attributed to Jeff Weiner 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