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: Ok, I admit it, value is my most overused word. It’s because I love the word. What do product managers and innovators create for customers? Value! How about organizations? They create value. What do customers want? The products they purchase must provide value — more value for them than other product options provide. How do product managers want to be seen by those that they work with? As someone who is valuable –again, creating value. Yes, value is central to product management and innovation.

It’s also an important term to my guest who has explored various models of value. He is the author of the weekly Pivot Product Hits, a newsletter for product managers on digital product strategy. He has been a Product Manager, creating digital products and services, for over 15 years, and is currently the Managing Director of Castle in the UK. His name is Paul Jackson.

In the discussion, you will learn:

What is important about creating value.The Almquist model of value.How to discover what customers’ value.

Hubert Palan, Founder & CEO, ProductBoard.com joins the discussion with Cindy F. Solomon and Malcolm Knapp to provide feedback on the validity of the Lean Definition Process. Hubert has over 15+ years of experience, MSc. in Computer Science, Berkeley MBA.

We walk Hubert through a Lean Definition inquiry of what the product is and how to communicate what the product is to be built. We grapple with developing the hierarchy of knowledge about the product features, characteristics, behaviors as well as how to sync internal mental models of what the product is, communicate across the organization to uncovering unknowns. How the Lean Definition process syncs with the process of identifying what the user needs and customer wants are.

The software application Productboard is a system of record for product management that helps teams make products people want: • Understand what users need • Prioritize what to build • Earn buy-in from colleagues & customers.  With one system for helping manage everything product leaders care about, PMs are equipped to make better product decisions. https://www.productboard.com/

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: As you know from my Product Mastery Roadmap, product masters are the product leaders who have influence throughout an organization to launch awesome products customers love and to build successful product teams. And, this is exactly the topic I discuss with my guest.

Richard Banfield has co-authored an exciting new book for product managers along with Martin Eriksson, the founder of ProductTank, and Nate Walkingshaw, Chief Experience Officer at Pluralsight. The title of the book is Product Leadership: How Top Product Managers Launch Awesome Products and Build Successful Teams. It is available for pre-order on Amazon.

The pre-publication version I was able to read was excellent and I’m looking forward to getting the final version when it is released in May. This discussion with Richard will give you a preview and valuable insights for becoming a product leader.

Richard is the CEO of Fresh Tilled Soil, where he leads strategic vision. He’s also a mentor at TechStars and BluePrintHealth, an advisor and lecturer at the Boston Startup School, and serves on the executive committees of TEDxBoston, the AdClub’s Edge Conference, and Boston Regional Entrepreneurship Week.

Whether you are a new product manager or one with 10+ years of experience, I’m sure you’ll enjoy this interview.

Cindy and Malcolm are joined by Barbara Tien, Co-Founder & CEO, Ponga. A Stanford graduate, Barbara had an early academic focus in cross-cultural communications prior to her career in technology as a product manager. Barbara has deep expertise in both hardware and software product management at the enterprise level, as well as with startups. She serves on the Membership Committee of the Founders Network peer mentorship program for tech startup founders. Ponga is building a software service to give design pros a way to collaborate with their clients by pointing into pictures. You can find more at pro.ponga.com

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: I’ve had the pleasure of interviewing guests with incredible insights for us product managers and innovators and today’s guest cuts through a lot of noise and presents clear principles for creating more successful products. My guest is the Chief Innovation Officer and Vice President of Innovation for Snap-on, the leading global innovator, manufacturer and marketer of tools, diagnostics and equipment solutions for professional users. His role is to drive innovative products, solutions and processes that fundamentally change the markets Snap-on serves and enhance customer perception of its brands. He has helped to create, support and institutionalize a culture at Snap-on that embraces creativity, risk, change and fearless innovation. As you hear in the interview, prior to joining Snap-on, he spent 4 years in Marketing at PepsiCo, most recently as the Director of Innovation for the Frito-Lay Convenience Foods division. Before joining PepsiCo, he was Marketing Director of New Products at Kraft Foods. He has over 20 years of experience focused on new product development, marketing and innovation. His name is Ben Brenton and I expect you’ll find what he shared to be as valuable as I did.

We had to conduct the interview by phone, so the audio quality is a little different than normal, but not distracting.

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: Are you like other product managers and innovators? Do you spend your time like most do? Are the challenges you encounter different from other product managers? These types of questions are explored each year in the Annual Product Management and Marketing Survey. I explored the results of last year’s survey on The Everyday Innovator, and it is time to do it again for the 2017 survey.

My guest is returning for a second time to tell us about the pulse of product management as indicated by the survey. She is Rebecca Kalogeris, Vice President of Marketing for Pragmatic Marketing. Before joining Pragmatic Marketing, Rebecca managed product management and marketing teams at a variety of software companies. Among her marketing responsibilities is pouring through the survey results of the annual study, so she is the perfect person to discuss the state of product management with.

In the interview, you’ll discover:

Who do product managers tend to report to,How many product managers organizations generally have,The key challenges product managers face, andWhat would make product managers more effective.

Cindy and Malcolm discuss extending the lean definition into implementation - into the build itself - the development phase of the product lifecycle. Taking the list of features and mapping the functionality over into the actual technology so that everything the product does and is must be aligned to reality of how it will be built. It provides the full list of things that must be done to determine how far you are in the process of identifying all the behaviors, features and functions including the boring stuff!

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: I call listeners to this podcast Everyday Innovators. That means something. We are wired in such a way that makes us curious about problems people have, but we don’t stop there. Our real curiosity is how can we develop a product, or enhance a product, that solves a problem and creates value for customers. This is the world of product managers and innovators. And, as an Everyday Innovator, you are part of this world.

Some Everyday Innovators have emailed me asking to discuss tools for product managers. There are a lot of ways to think about tools, such as the innovation tools Evan Shellshear talked about in episode 113.

A common request is software tools for product managers and this is the episode for that topic. To help me, I found a company that maintains a list of software tools they use in their own work. They also add to the list other tools that could be used. In all, the list contains 87 tools. To discuss what is on this list, I spoke with Shah Ahmed, a project manager at the company, which is Indicative, a behavioral data analytics company. Shaw works on developing products and manages implementations of their platform.  Previously, he was a management consultant for Deloitte, focusing on large-scale technology changes for Fortune 500 companies.  His interest in building product started when he worked at a startup incubator at Cornell University during his undergrad.

If you have been wanting to hear about product management software tools, now is the time.

Malcolm and Cindy discuss scoping the product

1. how to extend the lean definition process

2. project scoping/implementation

3. revision process: how to deal with updates/changes lower on the development &/or new info

Malcolm and Cindy continue the conversation to develop the Lean Definition Process

1. sequences are basically pseudo code - the power of writing code without syntax is a real skill provides ability to describe behaviors of things you want to have happen in a precise way

2. interfaces & why are they on the list? the reason is its a classic point where design conflicts arise - as a high level object you can view it all as one piece

3. the skills for translating/abstracting reality into forms that you can make. Everything we talked about are to simplify what you see in front of you into implementable actions - putting all the information that we've captured organized in such a way that it is transmittable