How product managers can master product innovation management

Today we’re talking about product innovation management, one of the seven knowledge areas for product mastery. These are the knowledge areas that make us successful as product masters who know how to create new value for our customers. They also lead to more influence in our organizations. This is the second episode of a series where we’re diving into each of the seven knowledge areas.

Summary of topics discussed for product managers

Watch the full interview with PowerPoint slides on the Product Mastery now YouTube channel.

[2:06] What is product innovation?

PDMA defines product innovation as the creation and subsequent introduction of a good or service that is either a new or an improved version of previous goods or services. Product innovation involves creating value, which is judged by the customer.

[3:23] What factors influence product innovation?

There are four categories of factors that influence product innovation:

• Controllable
  • culture
  • strategy
  • capability
  • organizational structure
  • finances
• Uncontrollable
  • competitors
  • government policies and regulations
  • international environment
• Internal
  • board
  • management
  • marketing
  • production
  • finance
  • purchasing
• External
  • consultants
  • suppliers
  • regulators
  • agents
  • trade
  • customers

[5:19] Why is product work hard?

Successful product innovation is challenging because it doesn’t just happen by accident. As much as 70-90% of consumer products fail to meet their revenue expectations.

This means organizations are wasting financial and human resources at a tremendous rate. Your competency with these concepts in the Body of Knowledge helps equip you to turn this around and be more successful creating products customers love and that generate revenue for your organization.

Some famous examples of failed product launches that missed some aspect of product innovation are:

• New Coke
• Apple Newton
• Blackberry phone
• Nintendo “Virtual Boy”
• Segway
• Gerber “Adult” Food “Singles”

[7:20] What factors influence product innovation success?

I want you to be aware of success factors at three levels:

• project
• people and environment
• strategy

[7:39] Success factors at the product project level

• Develop unique, superior products, not me-too products
• Have a clear focus on a target market segment
• Do your pre-development homework
• Develop a clear, concise and stable product definition from the beginning
• Adequately plan and resource the launch
• Execute with speed—but not at the expense of quality of execution. This creates a tension that product teams live with—speed with quality

[9:01] Success factors at the people and environment level

• Organize project teams to fit the constraints and complexity of the project
• Create the proper climate and culture to support innovation and remove innovation barriers
• Enlist top management support

[9:35] Success factors at the strategy level

• Have a product innovation and technology strategy that is aligned with organization strategy
• Leverage core competencies
• Target attractive markets
• Use portfolio management
• Use the necessary resources for each project

[10:34] What does research tell us about product innovation success factors?

The PDMA Comparative Performance Assessment Study has identified factors consistent among high product innovation performers, organized into seven areas. They study is conducted every few years, and the most recent one was titled Product Development Global Best Practices Survey.

[11:26] 1. Innovation Culture

• Failure is understood
• Managers establish objectives
• Innovation is considered in recruitment
• External communication is used
• Innovation and risk-taking are valued
• Constructive conflict is encouraged
• Internal communication is effective

[12:32] 2. Product Strategy

• Well-defined new-product strategy
• First-to-market or fast-follower strategy
• Focus on sustainability
• Intellectual property considerations
• Global business model

[13:24] 3. Portfolio Management

• Select projects
• Balance across projects
  • Radical vs. incremental
  • Low vs. high risk
  • New vs. existing markets

[14:09] 4. Product Process

• Formal, cross-functional process
• Continuously re-design the process
• Specialized team structures to drive product innovation
• Adopt flexibility
• Senior manager support

[15:16] 5. Front End of Innovation

• Spending considerably more effort to understand customer needs
• Formal processes for idea assessment
• Open Innovation
• Social media to gather customer information

[16:09] 6. Development Tools

• Use market research tools to understand customers
• Use engineering design tools
• Emphasis on project planning tools

[16:32] 7. Measures & Metrics

• Formal metrics for measuring performance
• Metrics for both outputs and process:
  • Outputs—product profits
  • Process—milestones

• Metrics for continuous improvement

[19:10] What does a product manager do?

The responsibilities of product managers vary by organization, but some general responsibilities include:

1. Understand customer experience
2. Develop vision
3. Prioritize processes and activities
4. Develop product pricing and positioning
5. Negotiate with stakeholders
6. Build and follow a roadmap
7. Arrange product testing groups
8. Drive product launch
9. Participate in the promotion plan
10. Build and maintain product awareness

[20:22] What are the skills of successful product managers?

• Discovering customers and their needs
• Market knowledge
• Innovation awareness
• Strategic thinking
• Technical knowledge
• Expert communication skills
• Relationship management
• User behavior understanding and empathy
• Ability to explain business and technical requirements
• Measuring the success of a product

A product manager is responsible for market success. They develop the product strategy and engage in product work through all stages of work—idea to launch and ultimately to product retirement.

A product manager works across functions, such as development, marketing, sales, and finances, to coordinate resources, transfer to them the product vision, and build a product roadmap.

[21:53] What are some key metrics for tracking product management performance?

• Monetization
• User engagement
• User satisfaction

[22:20] What are key strategies for a Product Manager’s success?

1. Create a vision
2. Develop a plan to execute the vision
3. Guide the development of products
4. Commercialize the products

Watch the full interview with PowerPoint slides on the Product Mastery now YouTube channel.

Put the information Chad shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide.

Useful links:

• Check out the 2024 Product Development and Management Body of Knowledge by Allan Anderson, Chad McAllister, and Ernie Harris
• Find out how the Rapid Product Mastery Experience, the fastest path to higher-performing product managers and teams, can help your team

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.

The essential knowledge areas that give product managers more influence and success

Today we’re talking about the seven knowledge areas for product mastery. These are the knowledge areas that make us successful as product masters who know how to create new value for our customers. They also lead to more influence in our organizations. This is the beginning of a series where we’ll dive into each of the seven knowledge areas.

Summary of topics discussed for product managers

Watch the full interview with PowerPoint slides on the Product Mastery now YouTube channel.

[1:14] Who is Chad McAllister?

I’m a product management professor, practitioner, trainer, and host of the Product Mastery Now podcast.

[3:19] Chad’s path to product management

• Worked in software project management
• Became fascinated with why we sometimes miss the mark in developing products for customers
• Earned a PhD in Innovation to study this problem more deeply
• Discovered the Product Development and Management Association (PDMA)
• Learned the PDMA product management and product innovation Body of Knowledge (BoK)
• Created an online training system for people to learn the BoK, including the seven knowledge areas
• Contributed to the BoK, which is now complied in a book released every few years

[13:40] Co-author of the 2024 edition of the Product Development and Management Body of Knowledge: A Guidebook for Product Innovation Training and Certification

[15:31] Why did Chad co-author the 2024 BoK?

• I value the BoK and want to improve it
• Opportunity to give back to the product management community
• Not for book royalties—all sales support PDMA, a non-profit organization

[17:10] Who is the BoK for?

• Product managers, innovators, or leaders seeking comprehensive guidance on the required disciplines for increasing the success of product innovation
• Those planning a new career in product or innovation management
• Everyone committed to earning the New Product Development Professional (NPDP) recognition to demonstrate their understanding of product innovation

[21:55] Why might you be interested in the BoK?

• Product professionals need a proven framework to fill gaps in their knowledge while also deepening their understanding
• The BoK provides an established framework for a wide cross-section of product and service industries at various levels of an organization
• Only PDMA can provide this, based on researching and curating the body of knowledge since 1976

[26:23] What’s next?

Over the next few weeks, we’ll discuss the seven knowledge areas:

1. Product Innovation Management
2. Strategy
3. Portfolio Management
4. Process
5. Design & Development
6. Market Research
7. Culture & Teams

Watch the full interview with PowerPoint slides on the Product Mastery now YouTube channel.

Put the information Chad shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide.

Useful links:

• Check out the 2024 Product Development and Management Body of Knowledge by Allan Anderson, Chad McAllister, and Ernie Harris
• Find out how the Rapid Product Mastery Experience, the fastest path to higher-performing product managers and teams, can help your team

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.

The habits that set apart transformational product leaders

Today we are talking about why organizations are increasingly facing the need to transform and how to navigate those changes. If you have experienced a big change, you already know firsthand how challenging it is. All of us need to know the principles that make transformations successful, and that is what we’ll takeaway from this discussion.

Joining us is John Rossman, who was an early executive at Amazon and led the launch of the Amazon Marketplace (which allowed third-party businesses to sell on Amazon). He is a four-time author including best seller “The Amazon Way” and “Think Like Amazon,” as well as a sought-after business advisor and keynote speaker. His expertise is on leadership for innovation and business transformation.

His most recent book is Big Bet Leadership: Your Transformation Playbook for Winning in the Hyper-Digital Era.  

Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers

[2:41] What advice have you received that helped you think about how to have more successful influence in the organization?

I had a longtime business partner, Steve, who told me, “After Amazon, your superpower is always clarifying and simplifying the discussion, the meeting, or the communication.” I recognized from Steve that one of the things I learned at Amazon was how to clarify and simplify. Especially in a complex situation, the person who can clarify and simplify the communication is the controller of the situation.

After I left Amazon, one of my key clients was the Gates Foundation, and Greg Widmyer told me, “You do a really nice job taking the little strategies, inserts, and mechanisms from Amazon and delicately implementing them and influencing our work. I think you ought to write a book about it.” The ability craft a story and influence others at scale through a book was a great piece of advice and something I had never thought about before.

[5:48] What are Big Bets and why are they important to organizations?

A Big Bet is any initiative, strategy, or project that both has the potential for significant business impact and business upside and has significant multi-sided risks or assumptions. They are not simple initiatives or straightforward capabilities.

Big Bets typically happen at the enterprise level but can happen at the team or product level. They get called lots of things like market repositioning, merger integration, digital transformation, AI strategy, etc.

Big Bets have a 70-85% failure rate, but those are all errors of commission where an initiative was taken and it didn’t work as scheduled. The biggest failure point is typically the benefits. But those statistics don’t count the errors of omission where a Big Bet was needed but one wasn’t taken. When you see a company go from great to average or from average to irrelevant, a Big Bet was needed.

The framing of my book, Big Bet Leadership: Your Transformation Playbook for Winning in the Hyper-Digital Era, is critical to answer the question, why are Big Bets needed? It’s my hypothesis that these past 30 years of digital change has been the warmup innings for the next era, which we call the hyper-digital era. The companies that can make a core capability out of transformational change, high potential impact, and high risk will win. In addition to being operationally excellent and great at incremental moves, they are going to be great at these transformational capabilities, these business model changes that are so essential. Those are the Big Bets.

[9:33] Tell us about solving wicked problems.

If you asked me, “John, what are you good at?” I would say I’m good at solving wicked problems—multi-sided, non-obvious problems. Technology is just one of the mega forces that I think will drive this next era. Mega forces include change, labor force, and population. Another mega fore is the need for our country to drive innovation. Just to be able to afford the required spending, we have to grow the economy. Those mega forces combined will create this cyclone of transformational change.

There are going to be a lot of new winners and new losers. Transformation has to become a core capability for senior leaders. Today, it is not. That’s the problem we are trying to address in Beg Bet Leadership.

[11:44] Can you share a success story—why transformation was needed and what the leader did to make it successful?

My co-author Kevin McCaffrey drove new business incubation at T-Mobile, a company that has gone through a decade or more of Big-Bet success. In the book, we feature four Big-Bet legends: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, John Legere, and Satya Nadella. The story of T-Mobile starts in 2013 when John Legere declared war on the other three major carriers and started the uncarrier moves. Over the next five to ten years, T-Mobile underwent 12 sets of uncarrier moves. It took them from an irrelevant fourth-position carrier to a brand and innovator in a very commoditized business. They created value propositions for customers by doing the exact opposite of what the industry did. Before T-Mobile changed the game, we had to sign contracts for phones and carriers and pay overage and roaming fees. It was all customer-unfriendly. John Legere led a revolution. T-Mobile’s stock is up over 700%. They’re now the market leader. John Legere set up a system for Big Bets.

Kevin and I studied these legends to understand what they do differently from other operational leaders. Our framing is that Big-Bet legends have three habits:

• Create clarity.
• Maintain velocity.
• Accelerate risk and value.

[16:05] What are the differences in innovation practices between T-Mobile and Amazon?

Amazon has an innovation approached called Working Backwards. They start with the customer and work backward. They use written memos and active debate to experiment and make both high-stakes decisions and refinements before they commit resources.

Many former Amazon leaders make the mistake of implementing Working Backwards at their companies. It typically fails big-time because you don’t have the culture, the DNA, or the background to be successful. Kevin and I, from a first-principles standpoint, redesigned a Working Backwards process that fit T-Mobile. A lot of that experience is now in Big Bet Leadership. We outline a specific approach of how to write memos that help create clarity that sets up the other two habits that are the essential underpinnings of being successful at Big Bets.

[18:21] What should product managers know before implementing a successful practice in a new company?

Understanding the cultural norms and natural orientations is critical. T-Mobile is a very finance-driven organization, almost to a fault. We weren’t going to change that. We figured out how to take advantage of that through our application of this memo process. We feature the financial case as part of the ambiguity that has to be tested away before we go big on our Big Bets.

If you need to change everything about how the company works, you’re setting yourself up for failure. Shrink the change and minimize the transformation to get to the real business transformation.

Tell us about the three habits of successful Big-Bet leaders.

[20:27] Create clarity.

Start with customer centricity. You have to get to the real “what sucks.” Our first memo is called the What Sucks memo. It’s easy to talk about the low- and middle-grade issues your user has, but what’s the real “suck” that would get them to actually switch to buy your product or service at a premium? Get to that level of understanding through all your customer research, and capstone it with a singular point of view: Here’s the customer. Here’s what sucks. Here’s the killer feature. What’s the one use case, feature, or combination of things that would solve this “suck”?

Once you have a great definition of the suck and the killer feature, you can make the outcome definition. What is your crystal clear value proposition that would deliver this killer feature? What are the three to five critical assumptions, risks, or things that have to be true in order to deliver that killer feature and that outcome definition?

Bezos says he wants “crystal narratives with messy meetings.” Have the clear memo and then allow wandering in the discussion. Writing memos is hard, but it makes it so much easier for the senior executives to understand the situation and what you’re proposing, to see underlying opportunities, and to weigh them against other potential resource allocation decisions. We have a lot of really good ideas, but we can only go with a limited number. We create clarity by separating out the right Big Bet from all the other good ideas.

[24:04] Maintain velocity.

It’s easy to start off with energy and commitment, but your transformation can quickly become just another typical project or initiative. For Big Bets, you have to predict the issues that come along with Big Bets, like policies, naysayers, and stakeholders. To maintain velocity, you have to put your Big Bet in an environment that will allow it to have a pace that is unnatural for typical projects.

[25:12] Accelerate risk and value.

Accelerate risk and value, deferring as many other commitments and resources as possible until the big assumptions and unknowns are better understood. This is the most counterintuitive habit for most senior leaders. We tend to fall in love with an idea and then announce it and start budgeting and making commitments against it. That doesn’t allow us to test and validate those big assumptions we’ve been making or allow our project to change. When the team members see all the commitments they’re being signed up for, everyone becomes task-oriented and starts de-risking the project, and that’s where the biggest failure points happen. Our ambition becomes lower, so we might deliver the initiative but not the promised impact that went along with it.

Action Guide: Put the information John shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide.

Useful links:

• Order Big Bet Leadership on John’s website or Amazon
• Visit John’s website
• Connect with John on LinkedIn
• Listen to episode 448 on Amazon’s Working Backwards approach with Colin Bryar

Innovation Quote

“The greatest danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short but in setting our aim too low and achieving our mark.” – Michelangelo

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.

Tools for making voice-of-the-customer insights more accessible to product managers

Today we are talking about aspects of the Market Research knowledge area for product mastery. Specifically, we are discussing how to overcome challenges collecting actionable customer insights.

Helping us with this is Prashant Mahajan, the founder of  Zeda.io. Prashant is an experienced product manager and leader, having guided product development in several organizations.

In these experiences, he identified a critical gap: Many Product Managers are unsure if they are building the right products because they can’t access customer feedback, customer insight, or sentiment. This led him to developing Zeda.io, which is also focused on the importance of publicly sharing product roadmaps and progress with customers.

Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers

[2:52] You founded Zeda.io to help product managers capture the voice of the customer and get actionable customer insights. What challenges did you encounter as a product manager that gave you experience for improving how to gain customer insights?

We learn about product management best practices, like solving customer problems and making a strategy, but most of the product management I saw in companies was about operations. Updating an Excel sheet or going to a meeting was taking up too much of my mental bandwidth. I thought there could be a better way to do product management, where operations are taken care of by software. We took inspiration from GitHub AI Copilot and Chat GPT. We started with the vision to make product management simpler and smarter.

Product management can be divided into product discovery, prioritization, building, and launch. Most product people are good at building things, but they don’t know what problem to solve. If people knew what to build, we would not see companies launch useless products and fail.

I experienced these challenges firsthand in my previous company. You get input from sales, support, customer-facing teams, and user research. As the company becomes bigger and bigger, the distance between the product team and the user keeps increasing. Meeting with people is like playing Telephone, and by the time you get information, it might be four or five people away from the customer. You can’t go to one place and find out what your customers are asking. I wanted to make a platform where you can centralize the customer voice, analyze it, generate insights, and make the key takeaways actionable.

The product team, including designers and engineers, needs to know why they are building things. If you tell them the problem and the impact of solving it, they can brainstorm together and ship it out. It’s critical that you’re using your resources for the right problem, which will create impact, and not just randomly building things.

[10:24] After you built a product to solve your problem, how did you validate the pain points and core problems for the larger product management community?

I am a strong proponent of talking to people. In the last three and a half years, I have had a call with a product leader on average every day. I’ve talked to CPOs, VPs, and people who have just started as the first PM at a startup.

The core problem as a product leader is there are so many ideas and a lack of confidence on deciding which idea to pursue. You need to justify the ROI of building a product.

One CPO said he needed our product to be insurance for his job. If the product didn’t work, he would be fired. He needed the data to save his job.

[14:18] How does your product at Zeda.io help product managers?

We focus on product discovery and planning. We centralize all your customer voice or input from customers and customer-facing teams in one place so you don’t have to juggle meetings and Excel sheets and you don’t lose any information.

We use AI to analyze customer input and show its impacts: What are your top customers asking? What are you current customers asking? What are your potential customers asking? What are the biggest pain points, opportunities, feature requests, etc?

You can adjust the prioritization framework to prioritize based on revenue, number of requests, particular product, etc. You can convert an action into a Jira ticket. When you ship the product, we’ll help you publish release notes and updates, which help with adoption and NPS and reduces churn.

[16:54] How is the problem of transparency with information addressed in organizations now and by your platform?

If you don’t have a tool like Zeda, you will have separate tools to keep track of information from sales, customer support, user research, product, etc. The tools and processes would be different, and the information would be scattered. Getting access to information from different sources and converting it to a presentable form will take weeks.

We have built native integration into all the different tools. The information is centralized in real time. This cuts down weeks of collecting information to days.

[21:19] How can AI be leveraged to help product managers?

One way is taking care of operations. I can write SQL queries or I can ask the AI to do that work. Building a product is an art and a science. The craft of building a beautiful product requires a lot of focused attention. If the AI takes care of operational speed, you can do more strategic, creative work.

The second use of AI is researching your product. Once you have identified what to build and spent time doing strategic, creative work, brainstorming with AI before a meeting will help a lot.

For example, if you’re building a product for older people, you could ship it to a 70-year-old person and find out you need to make the font size bigger. Then you go back to your development team and tell them to make the font size bigger. Instead, you could ask AI to tell you about research that has already been done that shows that conversion rate increases with font size.

Action Guide: Put the information Prashant shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide.

Useful links:

• Learn more about Zeda.io
• Connect with Prashant on LinkedIn

Innovation Quote

“Fool did not know it was impossible, so he did it.” – 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.

How product managers can design their customer experience journey

We all want to create products that customers find valuable and even delightful. But accomplishing that is complicated, and some teams lose focus on the real objective or start without a clear vision for what they need to accomplish. How can using the customer experience journey help you make better products?

We are about to find out with Jason Friedman. Jason has started successful businesses in several industries including medical diagnostics, automotive, spirits, and digital media. He has taken his experience and knowledge and focused it to help companies gain an unfair advantage over their competition through the art and science of designing their “customer experience journey.” He is founder and CEO of CXFormula, which works with entrepreneurs to Fortune 100 companies including Nike, Universal Studios, Burger King, Bank of America, and others.

Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers

[2:26] What is the customer experience journey?

The customer experience journey is the perception that a customer has after interacting with your product, service, brand, and team. The most important piece is how people feel.

Today the customer experience journey is more important than it ever has been. Today, AI has dominated everything, so people can create a new product or idea in minutes. Where we shine as product managers is in the experience people have with our product. We can make it amazing, and that’s what differentiates us in the crowded market.

[5:38] I’d like to provide two scenarios. First, sometimes startup founders develop a product to solve their own problem and assume others experience the problem the same as they do. Second, established companies can believe they are the experts in their domain and tell customers what they need. In both scenarios, the customer experience is not considered. How would you avoid these problems?

The customer experience journey is all the touch points a customer has with your product, including brand, service, support, usability, and instructions.

There’s that famous quote from Henry Ford, “If I asked people what they wanted, they would have told me faster horses,” and Steve Jobs has been quoted as having a similar perspective. Often, customers don’t have the vision for creating a paradigm-shifting solution. Those companies might be right that their customers don’t know, but they miss the deep understanding of their customers. When we don’t truly understand our customers and what they really need and want, we can create a product that may be awesome but that customers are not going to adopt.

I don’t want to discourage anyone from thinking outside the box. If you only rely on what your customers tell you, you might miss out on coming up with some amazing innovation. But finding out how to really understand our customers and their true wants and desires is problematic for many of us. We don’t really know, so we rely on superficial information.

My background is in theatre working behind-the-scenes. In theatre productions, the focus is almost exclusively on the audience—the customer. Everything we do on stage is about the customers’ reaction.

In our businesses, we often lost sight of the customer. A business owner who built a product for themselves might have been the customer at one point, but often they have the curse of knowledge. They know too much and lost sight of where their customers are. They might overdevelop or create something that’s not aligned with the customers’ true needs.

One of the tricks is to get inside the customer’s head. Pretend like you’re going to play your customer on stage as a character. Get into character. Many famous actors use method acting. They go deep in understanding that character so much so that they know what they had for breakfast or who their imaginary friend was when they were a kid. Sometimes they make this up, but they make it up in real context and try to walk in their character’s shoes. All their research is to understand all the things that make them tick. They’re able to articulate what’s going on inside that character’s mind that the character might not have been able to say themselves.

As you think of developing a product, if you can get into the head of your customers and really understand them, you can start to solve their problems and show them a solution that they couldn’t have told you they wanted, but when they see it, they say, “That’s it. That’s what I need.”

[11:30] What’s another action we can take to better understand customers’ pain points?

Amazon is a great opportunity. Look at products on Amazon that solve similar pain points and read through the reviews of all the frustrations. It’s a gold mine of information on how to make a better experience for people and maybe even how to invent a better product. Once we know who that market is and what their frustrations are, we can put something together from there.

[13:40] What do we do once we’ve identified pain points?

When you’ve identified all the pain points, all the moments where it gets even a little bit more hard, frustrating, or annoying, think about how to reduce or remove that. As you start thinking about getting into character, once you’ve designed your product, now become your customer and use it from opening the box. Was opening the box impossible or a pleasure?

We try to decrease time to first value, the shortest amount of time for someone to perceive a “wow” or moment of value. The shorter time period until they experience that moment, the better. If the moment you receive the package is a “wow,” everything’s going to be better. You’ve just shined sunshine on a cloudy day, and all the other steps are going to be great. If you actually think through the other steps and they are also positive, now you’ve really got an amazing journey that people are going to be excited to go on with you.

[16:48] What tools do you use to understand the customer experience journey?

We have a proprietary tool we use. We map out the existing customer journey and then identify friction points and places where we can increase the joy. We map the customer journey to what we call a kinetic pathway. Think of it like a water slide. If there’s not enough water, it’s really hard to go down, but if there’s plenty of water, even if you start to go uphill a little bit, you’re still able to get to the end of the slide.

We map out every single step from pre  learning about your product all the way through to post using your product or service. The key is to do this from the vantage point of your customer. If you send them an email, write down, “receive an email,” because you’re being the customer.

Then we break down each step of the journey into five different dimensions:

1. What are they doing?
2. What are they thinking and expecting?
3. What are they using to do this step?
4. Who or what are the interacting with?
5. How are they feeling?

If you map out the whole journey, you’re going to see a crazy roller coaster ride of the customer’s feelings. You’re going to find the friction points almost immediately. When you identify those friction points, ask, “Why is this hard?” It may not be that the step it hard. It may be that an expectation needs to be set a few steps earlier. Look at whether a friction point was affected by something before and whether each step is creating friction in the future. When you see this diagram, you get clarity on what needs to change to create an amazing experience.

[21:21] Could you talk through an example of a company that has improved their customer experience journey?

I’ll give the example of a restaurant, which I’ll call Tom’s Place. It was a local neighborhood restaurant that called us because they were about to go out of business. They had very few people come back a second time, and for most meals they had only three or four tables in use.

I asked the owner why he started his restaurant, and he said he wanted to create a restaurant like Cheers from the TV show. He wanted it to be “your dinner table away from home,” but it never turned into that. I asked a couple of people who were eating there how the food was, and they said, “eh,” and I asked them how the service was, and they said, “eh.” You can’t win in a restaurant with “eh” food and “eh” service.

I asked the owner, “What was the cool thing about Cheers?” He said, “Everybody knows your name.” We needed to up the level of service.

We transformed the restaurant by looking at every single moment. How does the first moment set up the next moment and the next and the next?

After our changes, when a customer came in the host would ask if it was their first time dining at Tom’s Place. If they said yes, the host would give them white napkins, and if they said no, they would get red napkins. When the waiters and waitresses saw the red napkins, they would say, “Welcome back. It’s so great to see you again,” even if they didn’t know their names. If it was white napkins, they would say, “Welcome to Tom’s. It’s so great to see you. Make sure you ask our waiter for our favorite meals. We have some awesome specials,” to build the excitement.

The waiters would introduce themselves, ask for the customers’ names, and write them down. The waiters would ask first-time customers if they have any allergies and ask if they would like a special appetizer on the house from the chef. The waiters would ask some questions and tell the customers the best things they could order. The whole experience was personalized, custom-tailored, and interactive.

At the end, the waiter would give their name and say, “It was such a pleasure to serve you. We want you to think of this as your dinner table away from home. So on any of those nights you don’t feel like doing the dishes or you want to hang out with some friends, come on back. I’d love to have you in my section. You can always ask for me or any of my colleagues. We just want you to come back and have a great time.”

All of a sudden, people were raving about Tom’s Place on Facebook and bringing their friends to show them how cool it was. The cost of this transformation was zero dollars. They had napkins coming from a linen service no matter what. We switched them from all white to half red and half white. It was about thinking through the journey. What was that first step? We needed to make a good first impression. We told the customers we wanted them to think of this as their dinner table away from home. We planted a seed so they’re thinking and expecting that now. Suddenly they said those same words, “Tom’s is like my dinner table away from home.”

It’s the thinking about the customer experience journey that is super powerful. The execution to create an amazing experience doesn’t have to expensive. It has to be thoughtful.

Action Guide: Put the information Jason shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide.

Useful links:

• Learn more about CXFormula
• Get a free PDF gift from Jason for PMN listeners: Gift.CXFormula.com/RPM

Innovation Quote

“Whatever the mind can believe and conceive it can achieve.” – Napoleon Hill

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.

How product managers can empower their teams

Today we are talking about how product leaders can create more effective teams by using a people-first leadership approach.

Joining us is Diana Stepner, Head of Product for Education at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. Her approach to product leadership empowers individuals, fosters collaboration, and connects with people in an authentic way. She is also a product leadership instructor on Maven and has held leadership and advisor product positions.

Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers

[2:09] What does people-first product leadership mean?

Launching people is just as important as launching products. When people feel supported, their product efforts shine. When I was defining my leadership style, a colleague referred to me as a servant leader. I appreciated the notion, but I didn’t really like the phrase. I’m not an attendant to my team; I lead my team. Instead, I wanted to acknowledge that I like putting people first, and that’s what I expect for my team. That’s where the phrase people-first product leadership came from.

[3:33] What are the key capabilities that leaders need if they’re going to adopt a people-first product leadership approach?

1. Positive leadership character: Show traits such as integrity, responsibility, forgiveness, and compassion.
2. Creating psychological safety: Establish an environment where team members feel safe to take risks, speak up, share their ideas, ask questions, be honest, and make mistakes.
3. Promoting a learning culture: Provide the opportunity to continually learn and improve as a team. That enables individuals to adapt to changes and strive for excellence. That’s really important in product management, because things don’t stay the same. We always have new technologies and new competitors, and product management continues to evolve. A learning culture ensures we’re staying up to speed on all the areas that impact our product.

[5:37] Tell us more about the aspects of positive leadership character.

1. Developing people: This takes integrity and responsibility. Focus on developing people, not just products. Help people gain skills, confidence, and knowledge, so the team can work better together.
2. Self-awareness and emotional intelligence: This takes compassion and forgiveness. Help individuals build their self-awareness and emotional intelligence. Understand your own emotions and understand and appreciate the emotions of others. Express empathy. I use an exercise called an Emotions Wheel that helps people identify their emotions.
3. Active listening: Develop a listening style that encourages people to be engaged and creates an environment that’s not competitive. Show that you’re being attentive to, comprehending, and internalizing what’s being discussed. Be able to summarize and move forward together.

[9:22] Tell us more about psychological safety.

1. Empathy and understanding: Create an environment where people feel comfortable to tackle the unknowns.
2. Experimentation: Encourage your team to experiment, try different ways to approach problems, innovate, and learn from failures.
3. Sharing mistakes: Build a culture where people feel comfortable openly discussing and learning from mistakes.

[14:28] Tell us more about how the Emotions Wheel can help create psychological safety.

The Emotions Wheel is an exercise I do at the start of my people-first product leadership course on Maven. It’s a great icebreaker. People put a dot on the Emotions Wheel next to the emotion they’re feeling. It helps everybody understand what others are feeling and gives an indication to me as the teacher of how to best incorporate individuals into the session. At the end of the day, we ask participants how they’re feeling now. That helps them acknowledge that new things can be scary and helps them look back at what they learned, the friends they made, and how their emotions were affected.

Another exercise I use is called a Read Me. It’s a document where you outline how you work most effectively and how others can best work with you. It’s a good way to break the ice and a reference point for new team members or to refer back to when you haven’t talked to someone in a bit.

[17:28] Tell us more about promoting a learning culture.

The main characteristic of a learning culture is empowerment through experimentation. Systematically encourage experimentation. Know the hypothesis, why you’re experimenting, and the desired outcome. Share successes and failures so the rest of the team learns too.

[19:04] How do you introduce empowerment through experimentation to the team?

I introduce the concept of experimentation by letting people know that I’m going to make mistakes. It’s often unexpected for a product leader to admit they’re going to make mistakes. The team is stronger when they feel comfortable sharing the knowledge that we’re all human and we’re all going to make mistakes. If they hear that from the leader and see it in practice, that helps the team feel more comfortable that they can make mistakes too. I create a space where we can learn from each other and revise our thinking, rather than always following my way.

[22:42] What can a product manager who is not yet a product leader do to help create a climate of people-centered product leadership?

Create a product management community of practice. Start by reaching out to someone else who wants to promote learning or create psychological safety. Then each of you can reach out to another person. You need about 33% of the desired people to be involved in your community of practice to start to see change. Depending on the size of your company, that could be a really small number of people. Start to identify ways you can influence each other and have that permeate out to the individuals you work with. If you mirror the characteristics you want to have reflected back on you, that will permeate out to others because they will feel supported and encouraged. You’ll begin to notice those people who are champions of they way you’re conducting your meetings or doing user research. You can identify those individuals who can be part of your community of practice.

Action Guide: Put the information Diana shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide.

Useful links:

• Check out Diana’s course on Maven
• Connect with Diana on LinkedIn
• Sign up for Diana’s newsletter
• Visit Diana’s website
• Listen to episode 474: Emotionally fit leadership for product managers – with Dr. Emily Anhalt

Innovation Quote

“Where there are no politics or people vying for a bigger slice of a pie, magic happens. When things are done collaboratively and equally, everyone roots for each other, and the only winner is the team.” – Jared Hecht

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.

Product management insights from medical innovations

Today we are talking about product management and innovation of medical products.  Throughout my career, I’ve often found the best insights for improving my product work by learning from other industries, so even if you are not involved in medical products, you’ll be able to apply the practices you are about to hear. You’ll learn where insights for new or improved products come from and the pitfalls to avoid in getting products launched.

We are learning with Ron Richard, a seasoned expert specializing in medical devices, medical diagnostics, and the life sciences. He has over 35 years of experience in the Medical Industry, has launched over 40 products, and has 17 patents under his belt. He is also the author of the book Someday is TODAY, which describes how to move from idea to launched product.

Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers

[2:17] How did you get your start in developing medical products?

I started through my experience as a respiratory therapist. I worked in intensive care where patients are often on a ventilator and intubated. It’s frustrating to try to communicate with patients because they can’t talk. The first product I invented was a communication board that has simple phrases on it that a patient can point to. I didn’t have any idea how to develop a product, but I saw a problem and came up with a solution.

I’m also a paramedic, and I worked on an ambulance. Back in the day, when you pick someone up and put them on oxygen, the oxygen cylinder goes right between their legs on the gurney as they’re transported to the ambulance. It was not very comfortable or safe. I bought some PVC tubing and straps and made my own oxygen cylinder holder. That got sold to the company that makes gurneys, and it’s still in use today.

[5:38] What skills are involved in discovering insights that lead to products?

Be open-minded. Be attentive to what’s going on in your surroundings. Live in the moment. When I’m dealing with critical issues with patients, I could get distracted, but I’ve had the ability to stay in the moment and not only take care of the patient but also work with the clinical team and observe what products they’re using.

[7:01] What role do patients play in getting insights for new products?

The first step is to come up with a platform or base idea. The next step is to interview patients and talk in general terms through a PowerPoint or show them a prototype and get their feedback.

Many years ago, when people started using CPAP, which is a way to keep your airway open through a mask attached to a machine by a hose, the masks were very clunky and hard to put on. You had to really tighten them up, and it would make a crease on your nose and a red welt around your face. I saw those problems right away with patients. Through my experience at ResMed, we developed some of the most world-class, very comfortable masks you could ever imagine. That really advanced the whole field of sleep apnea, because if the mask is not comfortable, the patient isn’t going to wear it.

[9:54] How do you make prototypes?

I’ve used all kinds of different materials: foam, cardboard, plastics. Now 3D printers are fantastic. You can make all different sizes and shapes of things as long as you’ve got a decent CAD drawing.

My book is focused on medical stuff, but I’m working on a project now using the same framework in my book to develop a new rain gauge. We’re using 3D-printing rapid prototyping.

[11:16] How does your innovation process apply to many different fields?

Early in my product development career, I attended a week-long workshop called the House of Quality that was put on by Ford and Toyota. I noticed the Ford and Toyota engineers had different approaches to developing products. The Japanese Toyota engineers seemed to develop products from being curious about something and talking to car owners and drivers about their experience. They were getting customer feedback and trying to develop something that would make the customer say, “Wow, this is fantastic. I love this car.” That’s what I’ve put into my medical career: Let’s make the customer exceedingly happy.

[13:12] What role do medical practitioners play in getting insights for new products?

I was invited to give at talk about product development and invention to the doctors at Stanford. After the talk, a lot of doctors told me, “I have these great ideas, and I just can’t get them out of my coffee cup. What’s the next step?”

I feel that clinicians are the best inventors because they see first-hand what doesn’t work well. Always be curious. Always challenge what you’re using or doing. Try to see where there could be improvements to ultimately improve outcomes in patient care. Be innovative. Develop things that are patient-focused, patient-centric, and patient-first, or customer-focused, customer-centric, and customer-first.

[15:53] Have you seen issues with medical practitioners or designers thinking they understand the problem better than the customer does?

There’s a constant balance that needs to be created in a company’s culture. The engineers who are designing and developing don’t really have medical backgrounds. If you have a good medical company, you’ll also talk to a panel of nurses, respiratory therapists, or doctors.

Sometimes products slip timelines or fail because of arrogance inside the organization. Someone in senior management says we don’t need to talk to patients or doctors because we’ve been doing this for so long so we know exactly what to do. They say we’re going to move forward because the longer we take to get to market, the more money we spend. They end up coming out with an inferior product.

It’s better to go slow and get enough input from the right people that you can make good decisions to move forward with the product.

In my experience, if someone has a strong personality and wants to disregard all the upfront work to build a product quickly, you end up making mistakes. You launch version 1 and then six months later you release version 2. In a year and a half, you’re on version 4.

You have to be patient and willing to go talk to people and develop relationships. I think about “Know, like, trust.” First, I get to know someone. After they get to know me, they like me. Then, the last step is trust. They trust to share information with me and I trust that what they’re saying is meaningful. I’m listening and taking the information back so it can ultimately help patients.

[19:47] What are some mistakes you’ve made or seen others make while moving from an idea to getting a product launched?

One mistake is feature creep. The danger of talking to customers is they may have various opinions on how to clinically approach a problem. If there is a person who holds high esteem within your organization, some people may ignore everyone else and develop a product for only one customer’s needs. You should blend all the information together. Feature creep means people come back to you when you’re fairly far into the product plan and ask you to add more features. That stretches out the timeline and makes engineers not like working at your company.

Another problem in the medical field is changes in reimbursement. You can go to market thinking your product fits a certain reimbursement, but every year the reimbursement rate can change. That can affect your ROI.

Action Guide: Put the information Ron shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide.

Useful links:

• Learn more about Ron’s consulting company, BLD Medical
• Check out Someday is TODAY

Innovation Quote

“Get your ideas out of your coffee cup and on the market and take action.” – Ron Richard, inspired by a conversation with a doctor

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.

The Discover, Analyze, Create, Develop Design Thinking Framework for product managers

You’ve heard about Design Thinking or even tried it. It is a simple-to-understand tool for solving problems, developing strategy, and most commonly for us product professionals, for developing a new product or service. And while it is simple to understand, that doesn’t mean it is easy to apply. I’ve seen Design Thinking mistakes, and I’ve made my own as well, which limit the results this powerful tool can provide. When you apply Design Thinking, wouldn’t you like to know you are getting the most from it?

That is why Tom Granzow is with us. He has applied Design Thinking to hundreds of projects and also trained over 1200 people to use it properly. Tom has held senior innovation roles with an emphasis on medical devices and equipment and now shares his 35 years of experience and knowledge with others as the founder of Granzow Design Strategies.

Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers

[2:23] Why is Design Thinking one of your primary tools?

I think of Design Thinking as a framework and set of tools for problem solving. There are four key things that Design Thinking helps me accomplish:

1. Getting closer to the customer
2. Turning insights from customer research into action
3. Driving collaboration
4. Experimenting and iterating

Design Thinking is a common framework that helps me communicate with other folks and get everybody on the same page.

[5:09] Tell us about the phases of the Design Thinking framework: Discover, Analyze, Create, Develop.

I modified these phases from Vijay Kumar’s model in 101 Design Methods.

1. Discover

a. Frame: Frame out the customer problem and what you’re trying to accomplish for your business.

b. Research: Build empathy. Understand customer problems.

2. Analyze

a. Facts: What did customers say and do?

b. Interpret: What did the customer research mean?

c. Synthesize: Identify patterns and turn them into something actionable for the team like design principles, journey maps, and personas.

3. Create

a. Brainstorm: Use a structured method, such as:

• Yes, and. Don’t say “no.” Say “yes, and” to keep the idea going.
• Creative matrix: Use this to break a big problem down into bite-sized chunks you can try to solve. Identify key problems on the horizontal axis and potential stimuli like materials and processes on the vertical axis. Brainstorm within each of those squares.

b. Visualize: Build a sketch, rendering, or prototype.

c. Combine idea fragments: Instead of trying to pick out idea fragments, combine them into bigger concepts.

4. Develop

a. Test and refine: Put your ideas in front of customers, get feedback, and iterate.

b. Repeat: Cycle through testing and refining many times.

[14:18] What do people typically get right when applying Design Thinking?

Companies that I have worked with really want to understand the customer. They don’t always have the right tools, and that’s what I’ve been able to help with.

People understand the Design Thinking framework. I try not to call it a process, since teams already have their processes and don’t want new ones. Once people go through the training, they understand the framework and tools and can apply them.

I’ve been very happy about the participation I’ve gotten. As long as I can explain what we’re trying to do, the engagement is amazing.

Design Thinking helps with collaboration. It’s fun and engaging. People like doing the Design Thinking activities.

[17:44] What do people tend to get wrong when applying Design Thinking?

Some people think Design Thinking is supposed to be a really structured and linear process. In reality, it’s iterative and messy. We’re not trying to say it’s super structured, but we’re adding a little bit more common language, tools, and expected deliverables. When people talk negatively about Design Thinking, I don’t think they understand how we’re trying to use it. It’s a framework that’s very flexible.

Another misconception is that Design Thinking is all about sticky notes and workshops. Sticky notes and brainstorming are tools.

You need to start with the user. Understand your customer instead of starting with a product or feature. Even worse, sometimes people want to use Design Thinking and start with a particular tool. Instead, start with your user and what you’re trying to accomplish.

People think Design Thinking is expensive or takes a lot of time. It’s a framework and set of tools, and it’s flexible. You don’t have to do all these steps. Design Thinking provides the tools to help with each part of the process. Teams can save time downstream by doing work upfront to understand the customer.

I teach two-day classes around Design Thinking, and I think they’re great. People get excited and walk away wanting to use Design Thinking. But that’s not enough. They also need help after that. You can’t learn Design Thinking in a two-day class. If you want to get good at it, you have to spend more time. Initially, you should probably hire somebody to help you with Design Thinking activities.

I’ve never liked the term Design Thinking. I worked with a professor at the University of Michigan who led an integrated product development class. I talked to him about Design Thinking, and he said, “We’ve been doing this forever. This isn’t new. Designers don’t own this. This is a process, set of tools, and framework that have been around for a while.” I kind of agree. I think the term Design Thinking is polarizing. I prefer the terms human-centered design, user-centered design, or customer-centered design. It’s about problem solving.

[24:53] How do you structure a Design Thinking workshop?

I typically do one- or two-day workshops with teams. I follow the discover, analyze, create, and develop framework.

1. Discover: I immerse the team in what we already know about the topic, from existing research and information from users.
2. Analyze: We pull out key insights. We do some exercises to generate and prioritize insights, such as affinity diagramming and writing “how might we…” statements.
3. Create: We brainstorm solutions. Then we go through prioritization exercises.
4. Develop: We evaluate the solutions and refine them, perhaps by considering importance vs. difficulty.

[27:08] In the analyze phase, you need to know what the customer said. Sometimes teams translate what they heard into company-speak and lose what the customer actually said. Have you seen this happen?

Yes, in that scenario you’re not really listening to the customer. You already have in your head what you want to hear. You spin what you’re hearing to fit what you’re already thinking about. Start with what the customer said and did. Write it down. Only then, interpret it.

[28:49] How do you put prototypes in customers’ hands instead of just showing them to customers?

I plan out the activities I want the customer to do with the prototype. I may show it to them and ask for their initial impression. Then I give it to them and see how they interact. Then I give them specific activities to do.

Action Guide: Put the information Tom shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide.

Useful links:

• Connect with Tom on LinkedIn
• Check out Stryker’s Xpedition powered stair chair

Innovation Quote

“The increasing complexity of products, services, and experiences has replaced the myth of the lone creative genius with the reality of the enthusiastic interdisciplinary collaborator.”  – Tim Brown, IDEO

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.

Product management insights from Molson Coors’s non-alcohol portfolio transformation

I am interviewing speakers at my favorite annual conference for product managers, the PDMA Inspire Innovation Conference. This discussion is with Marlon Hernandez, whose session is titled “Beyond the pint glass: Learnings from creating the new Molson Coors Non-Alcohol portfolio.”

After over 233 years of brewing beer, Molson Coors announced its name change to Molson Coors Beverage Company to reflect its growing focus on beverages outside the traditional beer offers. A successful market entry strategy in the non-alcohol space was one of the critical pillars of the transformational journey into a beverage company. Marlon will share with us the process of defining, shaping, and building this new portfolio and how the PDMA body of knowledge helped him during this process.

Marlon has held different innovation roles at the Molson Coors Beverage Company, including heading the newly established non-alcohol beverages division at its early stages.

Also, this episode is sponsored by PDMA, the Product Development and Management Association. PDMA is a global community of professional members whose skills, expertise, and experience power the most recognized and respected innovative companies in the world. PDMA is also the longest-running professional association for product managers, leaders, and innovators, having started in 1976 and contributing research and knowledge to our discipline for nearly 50 years. I have enjoyed being a member of PDMA for more than a decade, finding their resources and network very valuable. Learn more about them at PDMA.org.

Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers

[3:33] Why did Molson Coors want to create a portfolio of non-alcohol beverages?

Molson Coors has been brewing beer since 1786 with the Molson family in Canada. Adolf Coors starting brewing beers in Colorado in 1873, even before Colorado became a state in 1876. Beer will continue to be a critical part of our portfolio.

Right now, consumers are changing their behavior. They prefer a larger variety of beverage choices. At Molson Coors, we’re a consumer-centric organization. In 2019, we recognized that we needed to expand beyond beer and changed our name to Molson Coors Beverage Company. That was driven by the evolution of our consumers and our distributors. More than 60% of beverages consumed in the US are non-alcoholic, and some of our distributors already had started having products other than beer. The intersection of these factors triggered the creation of the non-alcohol portfolio, which I had the pleasure of leading.

[5:15] What did market research show about why consumers were switching to non-alcoholic beverages?

A combination of multiple factors triggered this change in behavior. In 2008, the Boomer generation reached an age at which their preference for beer declined somewhat.

The new generation of drinkers is more aware of what they’re drinking and more conscious of calories and nutrition. Some consumers love the taste of beer but don’t want to have alcohol at some moments. That triggered the creation of non-alcohol beer options.

Other consumers are looking to energize. The energy drink is one of the fastest growing segments in the beverage category. We want to continue building our portfolio in the direction the consumer is going.

Molson Coors recently launched Blue Moon non-alcohol. People love the taste of Blue Moon, but sometimes they want to enjoy the taste without the alcohol. We want to ensure consumers have options to enjoy every moment of their lives.

[9:06] How did you plan and structure your portfolio?

Even though beer and non-alcoholic drinks seem to be in the same category, there are different consumer behaviors, regulations, and commercial practices involved. Molson Coors has been brewing beer for more than 200 years, but we realized the first step for us was to accelerate our learning about this new category. We partnered with a company called L.A. Libations, which is an incubator for non-alcoholic beverages. This was our fast-track learning process about the non-alcohol space. When you go into a new market space, ensure you have a clear path to help you learn about that space. If you don’t understand your context, it’s really hard to create the right content for that context.

Next, understand your winning aspiration—what are your strengths as an organization and how can you add value in a new and different way? When I was building the market entry strategy for the non-alcohol portfolio, I identified the strengths we have as an organization and how we can add value for all our stakeholders. Molson Coors is an organization with an amazing ecosystem to scale business. When we complement that ecosystem with investment, it allows us to incubate new products and scale products.

As we thought about the winning aspiration, we realized consumers are looking for better-for-you products. We partnered with the energy drink company ZOA, that offers a better-for-you alternative to energy drinks. Our approach was to offer consumers a unique point of difference compared with what exists in the market. Sometimes, we have the temptation to build ten brands at the same time. Pace yourself.

[15:31] There must have been some naysayers who thought you shouldn’t go into the non-alcohol space or that you were cannibalizing your own product. How did you deal with that and keep the team excited to move toward your winning aspiration?

In 2019, the organization established a clear aspiration as an organization, which was premiumizing our portfolio. That was the umbrella over our beer and non-alcohol portfolios.

We asked, what is our interpretation of premiumizing the non-alcohol space to ensure there is consistency with our whole organization? We’re always going to go for non-alcoholic spaces that are more premium. We didn’t see ourselves in the economy segment; that didn’t make sense with the vision of a premium perspective. We went into spaces where consumers are willing to pay more, such as a premium energy drink.

We faced the challenge of keeping our teams excited. We partnered with ZOA, which was co-founded by Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. The celebrity behind the brand helped get people excited.

Another challenge was in our operation. We invested a lot of resources into educating our organization about the differences between beer and non-alcohol. We have online courses about the non-alcoholic space and commercial practices.

Instead of trying to create something new, we tap into existing processes with small tweaks. We build on the similarities instead of the differences to make integration easier. That helped us make it easy for people to get behind the change. We show them the path we’re going to go down.

We pace ourselves when making changes. If you ask people to change next week, they tend to panic. I think of our change process as a TV series, not a short movie. Season 1 was building the foundation. Season 2 was building the portfolio. Season 3 and 4, where we are now, is about optimizing the execution to become the best in class in the non-alcohol space.

[20:11] How do you show people the path you’re going to take?

Sometimes we live too much in PowerPoint-Land. We dream; we grow market share; we achieve aspiration; we build a portfolio. The challenge for product managers is how we translate that PowerPoint vision into reality. You have to take time to bring stakeholders into the journey. Explain what you’re trying to do and bring people along the journey to help you execute with excellence. Find the right balance between strategy and execution.

I like to use a visual when I explain my vision. I told my team Season 1 was about building a highway, which is the foundation to get the product to market. We need to make sure that when we put the cars, which are the brands, on the highway, that the highway is good. Sometimes when we launch a product, we underestimate the power of the route to market. Sometimes that’s where products fail. The fuel is the investment. You can have a nice Ferrari on an amazing highway, but if you don’t put any fuel behind it, it’s going to stop.

This visual helped people see my vision. The team leading the non-alcohol portfolio is doing a phenomenal job optimizing execution and maximizing the potential behind this brand (ZOA).

[23:56] How did you structure your portfolio?

Our first step was to understand the current state of the non-alcohol category. To make our route to market more efficient, we decided we’re only going to make shelf-stable products. Then we identified the price range that makes sense for our business and our consumers.

Then we looked at the consumer needs in those spaces—refreshing, hydration, energy, wholesome, etc. We identified what problem we’re solving in each of those spaces to help us add value. We identified energy drinks as a critical space. It’s shelf-stable and a growing category. A healthy alternative was missing in that space. We decided to solve that problem.

When we define a portfolio, sometimes you don’t know the answer. You need to go out there. We met with the founders of brands that were in the energy drink space to learn more from them. We found the right partner, which was ZOA.

In the wholesome space, which is drinks that have some additional benefit, we got into milk alternatives. During Prohibition, the Coors family produced malted milk. We wondered if there are any other ingredients behind beer that could be sold in the wholesome space. Recently, we started selling barley milk as an alternative milk.

We looked at where we could use our strengths, like being an expert on barley, and apply them to a different angle. We also focus on products where we have the freedom to develop something that could be disruptive. Since we haven’t been in this category for long, we’re willing to take risks and we have the freedom to design for consumers.

Action Guide: Put the information Marlon shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide.

Useful links:

• Connect with Marlon on LinkedIn

Innovation Quote

“I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.” – Wayne Gretzky, ice hockey player

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.

How product managers can create products that customers cannot be indifferent to

In episode 468, Dr. Merrick Furst introduced us to the discipline of deliberate innovation and how companies can create products customers absolutely must have. The purpose of this podcast is to help you create products your customers love. Products your customers must have takes this to a higher level.

I asked Merrick to join us again so we can learn some of the tools for creating such products, which he also wrote about in the book The Heart of Innovation: A Field Guide for Navigating to Authentic Demand. These will be valuable tools to improve your work as a product professional.

Dr. Merrick Furst, is a Distinguished Professor and the Director of the Center for Deliberate Innovation (CDI) at Georgia Tech. He has also founded numerous startups and in addition worked with hundreds of founders and innovators, helping them use the discipline of deliberate innovation.

Listen to episode 468 for part 1 of this discussion.

Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers

[3:28] In episode 468, you introduced us to Deliberate Innovation and the concept of a not-not product. Please review for us what a not-not product is.

We were trying to figure out how to help people make things that people would not be indifferent to. If they’re indifferent, that means that not buying is okay. They have other things they can do instead. When you’re building a product, you’re looking for a way to have authentic demand. The alternatives are just not okay, which means not buying it is not okay. As long as there are alternatives that are okay, you can’t be confident that people will buy your product.

Often, when people think about products, they focus on what they think people need or want or the thing that will delight them. People might love your product, but if they have other options, what difference does it make if they love your product?

To think more clearly as a product manager who is trying to help build something of value, it helps to think about not-not principles. What creates authentic demand is a situation in which not buying is not okay or not using the product is not okay for a customer. If you can train yourself to think in those terms, you start to see people and situations a little differently.

If you make a product people are using, the alternatives are not being used. There is something not okay about them.

Even though it’s obviously true that if someone could not buy, they’re not really a customer, people are not very comfortable asking a customer if it is okay for them to not buy the product. You need to know the answer because if it’s okay for them to not buy it, then you shouldn’t make it. People ask questions like, “Would it be helpful for you? Could you see yourself using it?” These are relatively useless questions. You need to know, “Is it okay for you to not use it?”

[9:13] Help us learn about tools that lead to creating not-not products. As we talked after the last episode, you told me about the “Waking Dream.” What is that?

We were working with innovators, product people, or founders who described to us why what they were doing was going to be meaningful to customers. We started to realize these people had an idea how the world worked that we call the Waking Dream. They’re living in some world where they think the know who their customers are, how they’re making decisions, and what their product means to the customer. It’s like a waking dream because it feels real. They don’t feel like they’re wrong. They operate as though that’s the way the world actually is. These people were making products that fit into the waking dream. They could see people buying and using the product. It all made sense.

The problem is that most often when people would get those products constructed and put them in the real world, the real world was indifferent. The products worked in the waking dream world. They didn’t work in the real world.

This led us to wonder what is this waking dream? How is it that people are walking around in this waking dream and not noticing it’s a waking dream until all of a sudden they discover that people don’t care about their product? Then they think they need to add features or charge less. They make up all these other stories about why it doesn’t work, but the reason is they made a product that’s not of the real world.

There’s a book called Being Wrong by Kathryn Schulz, in which she says that being wrong feels like being right. The difficulty of living in the waking dream is there’s no marker to tell you that you’re wrong. In situations that are uncertain, like whether people will buy your product, you’re relying on your judgement and your sense of what’s true, right, and wrong. We know that human beings make errors in judgements in situations of uncertainty. They don’t notice they’re making bad judgements.

I started to pay attention to how product people were making errors. It became so obvious that almost everybody we were talking to was making judgement errors. Judgement errors don’t mean you’re wrong. They just mean you don’t know if you’re right, so you might be wrong.

[21:29] How do we take steps to not be in a waking dream?

First, you have to recognize the problem. Notice you’re in a waking dream. People will often give you the answer you’re looking for. You’re trying to figure out whether they can be indifferent, but people want to be helpful, so they’ll keep making you feel like they’re not indifferent. Once you realize that, you can ask different questions, and you’ll likely find out they are indifferent. It’s okay for them to not buy your product. That’s uncomfortable to recognize, but it might take you off the path of wasting time and money on building something people are not interested in.

It’s often better to be subtractive in your thinking rather than additive. Ask yourself, If I don’t do this, can people be indifferent? Look at your customers’ situations and ask yourself what about their situation allows them to be who they are. What do they reach for? What relationships do they maintain? You can draw a situation diagram and list things that allow them to go about their lives while being indifferent toward your product. Ask which things in their situation they are indifferent to and not indifferent to.

Then you can ask them to change in some way. You have to do this by actually interacting with a potential customer, not by a survey. See if they can change what they’re doing. If they can’t, track down why that change is not okay for them.

In order for your product to work, customer behavior has to change. Your job is to see which behaviors have to change and then whether you can create that behavior change. Eventually you will see your customer so clearly that you will see how their current way of doing things has them stuck. Every way they currently go gets them to a place where they don’t want to be. They feel stuck, but they can’t change their behaviors for some reason. Your product’s value to them is that it enables them to change their behavior.

To create authentic demand, you need to see how a customer’s situation is set up so they’re constrained to not change, yet they are drawn to change. Then figure out how to build a product that allows them to change. You simply free them to be who they already are, and that’s what authentic demand feels like.

The problem with surveys and questions is you can only ask questions about thing that have names. Authentic demands don’t really have names. They’re weird insights about situations that people don’t even notice themselves. It’s exciting to get interested in your customers and know them better than they know themselves.

Action Guide: Put the information Merrick shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide.

Useful links:

• Check out The Heart of Innovation
• Connect with Merrick on LinkedIn

Innovation Quote

“If it is OK for you not make something, that is not OK. Figure out your own not-not and your customers’ not-not.” – Merrick Furst

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.

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