Global Product Management Talk

Global Product Management Talk is pleased to bring you the next episode of...

The Everyday Innovator with host Chad McAllister, PhD.

The podcast is all about helping people involved in innovation and managing products become more successful, grow their careers, and STANDOUT from their peers.

About the Episode: 

Creating products customers love feels like juggling a whole lot of balls at one time. It can be chaotic. It’s also a good bet that people on your product team, and most certainly in your organization outside the core team, have different understandings of what the product is about. It’s a real challenge to keep everyone on the same page.

The tool that brings order to the chaos is vision. The product vision is like the guiding northern light for the product team, keeping everyone moving in the same direction. It is the responsibility of the product manager to create and share the product vision.

Yet, it is not easily done. Very few great product vision examples exist. Thankfully for us, my guest knows how to create product vision and has done so many times. He is Jon Hensley, CEO of Emerge Interactive. Jon’s expertise is from driving innovation through design thinking from his work designing hundreds of digital experiences with organizations in a variety of industries.

Global Product Management Talk is pleased to bring you the next episode of...

The Everyday Innovator with host Chad McAllister, PhD.

The podcast is all about helping people involved in innovation and managing products become more successful, grow their careers, and STANDOUT from their peers.

About the Episode:

Product managers need to be high achievers and many are. They are the driving force that discover unmet needs customers have, creating value through their product work. The work is both demanding and fulfilling.

To be a high achiever, you can learn from those who already are. High achievers have some things in common. Knowing how they think and what they do can help you.

My guest, Arthur Carmazzi, wrote the book on high achievers, titled The Six Dimensions of a Top Achiever. Arthur is the founder of Directive Communication Psychology and is ranked among the top-10 leadership thought leaders by Global Gurus. In our discussion he shares six dimensions of top achievers:

Failure-proofDisciplineMotivationPersuasionVisibilityFinances

Global Product Management Talk is pleased to bring you the next episode of...

The Everyday Innovator with host Chad McAllister, PhD.

The podcast is all about helping people involved in innovation and managing products become more successful, grow their careers, and STANDOUT from their peers.

About the Episode: 

UX is a hot topic and for good reason. The right UX skills on a product team can make the product more successful. The wrong skills waste money and time. Many product managers and leaders make mistakes when adding UX roles to their product teams — but you won’t be one of them because of this discussion.

My guest shares the common mistakes and how to avoid them. He organizes UX skills into three categories: research, interaction design, visual design. Using the right skill at the right time during the development of the product is important. Otherwise, you’ll encounter the square peg in the round hole problem and no one is happy with that.

My guest has been a product manager and is a UX specialist with more than 15 years of experience. He has built UX teams from scratch and now helps organizations build and manage successful teams. His name is Sam Horodezky.

Global Product Management Talk is pleased to bring you the next episode of...

The Everyday Innovator with host Chad McAllister, PhD.

The podcast is all about helping people involved in innovation and managing products become more successful, grow their careers, and STANDOUT from their peers.

About the Episode:

Learning how to best work with a product team or organization requires taking the right action and avoiding mistakes. Your opportunities to a make a good first impression are limited, so you need to make the most of them.

Most product managers will work with a new team from time to time and many will change organizations. It turns out the tips for managing these transitions also apply to your daily work – tips to help you be a better product manager.

To explore transitioning well, Gavin Feuer joins us. He is now a senior product manager for T-Mobile, recently making the transition from Amazon. Gavin brings a strong entrepreneurial mindset to the role of product manager, which you’ll hear in the interview. His Amazon colleagues shared that his superpower is the ability to “think big.” He’s happy to help people who have a really big idea think more deeply about it. He also is a volunteer mentor to undergraduate students at the University of Washington, always willing to take on the right motivated mentee that is new to product management.

Global Product Management Talk is pleased to bring you the next episode of...

The Everyday Innovator with host Chad McAllister, PhD.

The podcast is all about helping people involved in innovation and managing products become more successful, grow their careers, and STANDOUT from their peers.

About the Episode:

To be a great product manager, do you also need to be a great actor? No, but there are lessons from acting that will make you a better product manager. While I have no acting experience, not even school plays, I have talked with several actors who became business coaches. It was not an obvious career path until I learned from each of them how their acting skills transferred to skills others need off the stage. They apply practices from acting to help business professionals and leaders.

So, when I saw an article in Mind the Product titled, “Oh the Drama! What Product Managers can Learn From Actors,” I eagerly read it. The author, Alison Kemp, shared seven areas where acting techniques can help product managers, which she called:

Thinking on Your FeetHigh-Performance TeamsCreative Thinking and InnovationActive ListeningPausingStorytelling, andIdentity

I asked Alison to join us to discuss some of these techniques. It proved to be a fun and insightful discussion with important tips for product managers and innovators.

Alison is the founder of Switchvision, which helps clients become more effective communicators, presenters, and interviewers by applying techniques from business, theatre, and psychology.

Global Product Management Talk is pleased to bring you the next episode of...

The Everyday Innovator with host Chad McAllister, PhD.

The podcast is all about helping people involved in innovation and managing products become more successful, grow their careers, and STANDOUT from their peers.

About the Episode:

We have a great topic for this discussion, addressing a question several Everyday Innovators have asked before, which is… “How do I get my manager to pay for product management training?” My guest will share the right and the wrong ways to get your manager and organization to support your professional development.

He is Matt Burns, an HR executive and winner of Canada’s Most Innovative Use of HR Technology award.

Global Product Management Talk is pleased to bring you the next episode of...

The Everyday Innovator with host Chad McAllister, PhD.

The podcast is all about helping people involved in innovation and managing products become more successful, grow their careers, and STANDOUT from their peers.

About the Episode:

What products do you use that you love? Think of a product that you are glad to tell other people about. You share how it helps you solve a problem or get a task down. Or, maybe how the product makes you feel. It might be your phone, a perfectly balanced and beautifully designed pen, a pocket knife that makes you feel just a little more self-reliant, or, in my case, the Paragon induction cooktop that allows me to make perfect omelets my wife and kids rave about.

Great products are ones that we love. They create emotions in us that go beyond satisfaction, extending to true delight.

Creating products that customers love is what product management is about, and also just happens to be the central theme for all of you who are Everyday Innovators. It is why this podcast exists and is the focus of this episode.

I explore the topic with Todd Olson, co-founder of Pendo, a capability for creating product experiences customers can’t live without. Before starting Pendo, Todd was VP Products at Rally Software and has been a co-founder for two other companies. He was also recently announced as an EY Entrepreneur Of The Year finalist. Todd knows a lot about developing software, founding and building companies, and creating products customers love.

Global Product Management Talk is pleased to bring you the next episode of...

The Everyday Innovator with host Chad McAllister, PhD.

The podcast is all about helping people involved in innovation and managing products become more successful, grow their careers, and STANDOUT from their peers.

About the Episode:

If you have ever had to explain what you do as a product manager to people you work with, you are in good company. Most product managers find this necessary. Further, the role means different things in different organizations. The leaders of your organization may have a perspective of the role that is not really accurate, or as I have seen more often, they don’t understand the leverage the role provides them.

In this discussion, we explore what organizational leaders need to understand about the role of product manager. But, we don’t stop there as product managers also need to have a clear understanding of the needs of the organization.

This discussion will help you better talk to the leaders of your company about your role and to understand your very important role more deeply.

To discuss the topic, I invited Kirsten Butzow to join us. She is a product veteran, serving as VP Product Management at Person and Blackboard and has held other product roles. Now she is a product coach for Pragmatic Marketing.

Global Product Management Talk is pleased to bring you the next episode of...

The Everyday Innovator with host Chad McAllister, PhD.

The podcast is all about helping people involved in innovation and managing products become more successful, grow their careers, and STANDOUT from their peers.

About the Episode:

Experienced product managers benefit from what they learned from previous successes and failures. That experience is valuable. However, they can also pick up some bad habits along the way. Some bad habits may be from a lack of knowing better but others come from routine and a “this is how we do it”-sort of mentality that too often develops over time in many organizations.

The first step to correcting bad habits is recognizing them and my guest is helping us with that. She is Alicia Dixon, senior product manager at Hilton. Alicia is involved with mobile and digital product innovation. Further, she volunteers for ProductCamp DC and shared aspects of our topic at recently at ProductCamp Silicon Valley.

Also, both Alicia and I have found value in product management training and certification. I began the interview asking her about this, as she currently has five product management certifications, which is more than anyone else I know. We both share the value we have found in earning certifications and why we encourage others to earn them as well. It has something to do with “ah ha” moments.

Global Product Management Talk is pleased to bring you the next episode of...

The Everyday Innovator with host Chad McAllister, PhD.

The podcast is all about helping people involved in innovation and managing products become more successful, grow their careers, and STANDOUT from their peers.

About the Episode:

Product management is a highly cross-functional role. Product managers work with product teams, R&D, engineering, marketing, finance, and others, but the one group that is most often discussed, especially in B2B organizations, is sales. You’ll hear about it at product management meetups, such as how a salesperson keeps asking a product manager to do product demos for customers or how the sales team won’t sell the existing product but some feature that hasn’t even been discussed yet.

This creates tension between sales and product managers, but it can also be a very positive relationship. Salespeople can get product managers access to companies for customer site visits and other customer research. They can be a source of earlier indications of a new trend forming or an old trend changing.

To understand how product management and sales can work better together, Ian Moyse is here to discuss the topic with us. Ian has a technical background with a product mindset and a passion for sales. He is currently the Sales Director for Natterbox, a UK-based Cloud Telphony company. He also received the UK Sales Director of Year award from Institute Sales & Marketing. He shares what sales wants from product management and how the two functions can work well together.