Hear about the role of the project manager in successful innovation from John Carter, an inventor of the Bose Noise Cancelling Headphones who shares the original patent with Dr. Amar Bose. John shares the surprising discovery they made by talking to customers about critical features. Topics include the differences between a program manager and a project manager, career progression for a PM, how to assess PM talent, managing project risk, establishing boundary conditions, small “a” Agile, and the characteristics of a successful PM.

Table of Contents

00:32 … Meet John

03:43 … The Bose Headphone Project

06:14 … Listening to the Customer

10:00 … Taking Risks in Innovation Projects

13:45 … Courage to Bring Bad News

15:30 … Effect of COVID-19 on Innovation and Work

19:46 … Program Management vs. Project Management

22:21 … Career Progression from PM to Program Management

26:19 … Characteristics of a Successful PM

28:11 … Why is it Difficult to Hire a Successful PM?

30:38 … Small “a” Agile

35:55 … Establishing Boundary Conditions

40:48 … John’s Success Tips

43:31 … Get in Touch with John

44:14 … Closing

WENDY GROUNDS:  Welcome

to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers.   A word

to our listeners.  If you have an

interesting COVID-19 story, how your project has been impacted by the pandemic,

we’d love to hear from you.  You can

email me at [email protected]. I’m Wendy Grounds, and with me is

project manager Bill Yates.

BILL YATES:  Hi, Wendy.

WENDY GROUNDS: We’re going to talk to someone today who is a

true innovation veteran.

Meet John

BILL YATES:  Yeah,

Wendy, I’m so excited to have John Carter join us.  He is very respected in the area of

innovation and product development.  He

is actually the co-inventor of the Bose

Noise Cancelling Headphones . We’ll certainly jump into this Bose topic

with him.  That’ll be a lot of fun to

discuss.

WENDY GROUNDS:  John

is also the founder of TCGen, and he’s

also been advisor to companies like Apple and Amazon with their  product development and innovation

processes.  So I think he comes with a

lot of experience and a lot of knowledge that he’ll be able to impart to us.

BILL YATES:  Yes.  John has been a project manager.  He’s been a product manager, he’s been a manager of managers, he’s led his own company, and so I cannot wait for the advice he’s going to share with us.

WENDY GROUNDS:  John,

welcome to Manage This.  We’re so

grateful to you for being with us today and being our guest.

JOHN CARTER:  Well,

thanks for having me.

WENDY GROUNDS:  Well,

we want to start off by asking you about your career path, and particularly to

do with the Bose headphones.  I think

most people are really going to be interested in hearing about that.  So tell me a little bit about yourself.

JOHN CARTER:  Well,

thanks for asking.  And it’s really part

of my passion.  It was true since I was a

kid.  I’ve always been kind of a boy

scientist and had a chemistry set and microscope,  telescope, I mean, whatever I could get my

hands on.  I really, really enjoyed

technology.  As I grew up, though, I

found the importance of sound.  I really thought

that that was something I wanted to know about. 

It’s invisible.  It conveys

meaning and emotion.  And as I learned

more, it has incredible range as far as what it can be used for.  Obviously speech versus music is something

that’s happening today.  With mobile

phones and speech recognition it’s just the Wild West.  So I’ve always been interested in sound.  In college I designed a music synthesizer

from scratch before its time.

BILL YATES:  Of course

you did.

JOHN CARTER:  Yeah,

right.  It kind of worked.  And when I was looking at graduate school, I

looked at places that had audio programs. 

And one of them was Stanford;

the other was MIT.  And I knew that Dr. Bose taught at MIT, and I

decided to go there.  I didn’t have a

scholarship at the time.  I just packed

up my car and drove across the country. 

It was half filled with record albums and my stereo and a few textbooks.  And I arrived in Cambridge without

support.  But I was determined to get it.

And I had amazing luck because I was taking Dr. Bose’s

course in acoustics, and he had just lost his teaching assistant.  And so he asked the class if anyone would

like to do it, and I raised my hand.  And

it was incredible.  It was a 20-minute

interview.  And he said, “Okay.  Let’s give it a go here.”  And it just so turned out what I studied as

an undergraduate was what’s called “signals and systems.”  But it’s kind of the big pieces of how the

parts work together to get a better system. 

And that was Dr. Bose’s approach and actually went into the headphones.

The Bose Headphones

Project

BILL YATES:  John, to

me the Bose noise cancelling headphones are iconic.  They were, like, revolutionary when they came

out.  How in the world did you get to

work on that project?

JOHN CARTER:  So when

I graduated, I was in the research department, and Dr. Bose was a mentor for

me.  And this was amazing.  We talk about luck and fate in what happens

here.  He invests a lot of time in his

former students who join the company. 

And so he and I had two ideas we were working on when I first

started.  One idea was how to improve a

loudspeaker, and the other idea was this new concept around headphones.  And so I started working on them both.

What I realized, and I went to Dr. Bose two months later,

and I said, “You know, we’re making a lot of progress on these headphones and

not so much on this other project.”  He

said, “Let’s just drop the other one.” 

And I think there’s a lot of innovation that comes about being lucky and

making the right choice.  I think we made

the right choice.  So it really came as a

natural outcome of collaboration, working on two research ideas.

And I could tell you when I first popped the prototype it

was all metal parts and everything on my head. 

It was like you were transported into another universe.  And you can turn the switch on and off, and

the change was mind-blowing.  I knew we

were onto something.  And what was really

interesting is that we thought as inventors we’d know exactly why customers

would really clamor for this.  And we

thought it was improved bass response. 

This headphone would give you better bass.

BILL YATES:  Yeah.

JOHN CARTER:  And it

does.  Well, we started offering this,

trying it out, getting feedback from various customers.  Turned out military was the biggest

interest.  And we went to

Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, as well as Army Proving Ground in Aberdeen.  And the feedback we got was not bass or the

performance.  This is noise reduction.

BILL YATES:  Okay.

JOHN CARTER:  The

benefit was noise reduction.  Now, we

knew about noise reduction, but we didn’t think that consumers would really

find that the most appealing.  That

discovery, an innovation that I think is really important, which is you have no

idea, really, even the inventor has no idea about what consumers will

ultimately value your invention for.  And

you would think you would know that, and you’re completely wrong.

Listening to

Stakeholder Recommendations

BILL YATES:  That is

huge.  And for project managers it is so

good to hear that from you.  Just to the

listeners, so John and Dr. Bose have the co-patents on these Bose noise

cancelling headphones that we’re talking about. 

So this was the guy that was right there from the start.  And John, as you’ve said, at first you guys

thought you were building it for X, when it turns out the customer said, no, Y

is much more important.

And from a standpoint of someone who’s charging ahead as a

project, I’m a project manager, and I’ve got goals, and I’ve been told by the

sponsor this is what we have to accomplish. 

And then you start to get feedback from customers, and you’re thinking,

you know what, this sponsor may be slightly off.  There could be greater value in this other

area.  This is a challenge to us, I

think, to be bold and go to those sponsors, share the information that we’re

getting from customers and the ultimate users to say, okay, maybe we need to

slightly change our path.

JOHN CARTER: 

Yeah.  This, I think, is a real

challenge for project managers.  And I

think there’s a right way and a wrong way to make a sudden right turn on a

project.  And I think the right way is to

say these are the stakeholders.  This is

what they’re telling us.  We think it’s

important and a direction that we ought to consider.

What a good project manager will do, in my estimation, is

they describe the benefit, and they also describe the tradeoffs, and then they

indicate a recommendation.  Because when

there’s a sudden change, I think project managers tend to be little myopic.  And they don’t step back and say, all right,

someone’s moved our cheese.  Here are the

new boundaries.  So if we can renegotiate

this contract and come clean on it, then we’re going to go in the right

direction, and you’re not going to be surprised in a couple months from now

when you forgot that we made this decision, Mr. Executive.

BILL YATES:  Right.

JOHN CARTER:  You

agreed to it, but somehow you remembered the old schedule or whatever.

BILL YATES:  Yes, the

old budget.

JOHN CARTER:  Exactly.  And so I think renegotiation of the project boundaries is really important as a project manager.  And also flexibility.  So there’s one other risk that I’m sure you’ve seen in your work with project managers is they’re given direction, and come hell or high waters, they go after it.  And sometimes when there’s a real indication from stakeholders that there’s a need to change, their heads are down, and they’re not going to make that change.  And that’s another quality of, I think, advanced program managers and project managers, to step back and say, wait a minute, you know, it doesn’t matter how quickly we climb that mountain if it’s the wrong mountain.

BILL YATES:  Yeah.