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: I took notice when Pitney Bowes created a Product Management Council, and I wanted to learn what they are doing with this council. Anytime an organization puts a focus on their product development and management capability, I expect good things to come of it. That’s because products are the revenue engine of organizations and the better job we as product managers and innovators can do creating products that provide customers value, the better it is for our organization.

To find out about this focus that Pitney Bowes has placed on product, I spoke with Felicia Anderson. She is the Senior Director of the Product Management Council and Launch Management at Pitney Bowes. She helps product managers build their skills to increase product launch success and deliver greater business impact.

In our discussion, you’ll learn:

tips for improving the product management capability of your organization,how to construct a vision of the product management team, anda simple way to get started through lunch-and-learn meetings.

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: This came up more recently when I opened my IDEA Framework eCourse that teaches the essential base of knowledge for becoming a product leader and doubling your product success. Many people asked if this would help them get into product management and I told them that while they need the skills it teaches to be successful as a product manager, it is for existing product managers — ones with at least a year of experience, not ones transitioning or who are brand new to the role.

So, I contacted someone who specializes in helping people become product managers and to get grounded as a new product manager. He has trained thousands of people on these topics, including leading workshops at General Assembly, Stanford, and for other schools. He also worked as a software product manager at NASA, Apple, Ticketmaster, and Live Nation.

And, if you regularly listen to The Everyday Innovator, you’ll recognize him as a returning guest, having shared specific tips for how to prepare for a product management interview back in episode 67. His name is Charles Du and this is a discussion you will enjoy and find valuable if:

you want to be a product manager, orare brand new to the role of product management, oryou wish to do a better job mentoring product managers.

Cindy and Malcolm discuss state machines and sequences – capturing what a product does vs. what a product is. This is one of the things that a lot of people ether don’t think about or think about in a vague way. What the product does impacts what it needs to be – this is yet another aspect of the product. We talked about the flow diagram, the heirarchical list of what it is – so now this is how you separate what it does from what it is – which requires skill. The experience of the product is everything together – it is very useful to be able to think about aspects of the product as distinctions – you use all of the noun pieces/features in the product and what it does is the verb. You constrain your vocabulary by what “is” the product. We get into the semantics of “product” and product concepts to be precise about the product description, especially at the beginning. Eventually the code is a very specific sequence of events

– if you wrote it in psudo code first, you could spend less time coding

– you can enumerate the behaviors of things and someone has to do it – therefore its the product manager’s domain

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 and product teams have the challenge of creating market-winning products — those are products that customers love and that create value for customers and the organization. Some product managers are not as effective as they could be, or they have actually become less effective over time. According to my guest, an effective product manager has six types of expertise. We’ll explore each in just a minute. This interview also gives me the opportunity to interview a legend in product management, along with providing you a glimpse at a side of him you may not know — as singer and songwriter.

He has been working within the high-tech arena since 1979 with experience in technical, sales, and marketing positions at companies specializing in enterprise and desktop hardware and software. His market and technical savvy allowed him to rise through the ranks from Product Manager to Chief Marketing Officer. He has launched dozens of product offerings. Before founding Under10, his product management consulting company, he was a Pragmatic Marketing instructor for over 15 years. His name is Steve Johnson.

In the interview you will learn the six areas of expertise that effective product managers need:

Technology,Operations,Process,Domain,Market, andBusiness.

Our guest today is David Ordall, CEO of Everbooked, a demand-based pricing startup, and ExaVault, a business file sharing startup. Previously, he has worked as VP of Engineering at Huddler.com and as CEO/CTO at CyberSense. David’s passion and area of expertise – is building technology companies. He is well versed in both the technical and managerial aspects of fast-paced, agile software development and the lean startup methodology.

Malcolm Knapp and Cindy F. Solomon further discuss the thinking around the lean spec product definition. Cindy is founder of Startup Product Academy which creates and nurtures inclusive local communities for passionate product professionals across disciplines, provides a sandbox for product and skill experimentation, and enables a launch pad forwarding product people, product ideas, product teams, and product success. Malcolm Knapp produces the Engineer Accelerator.

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: This is the where product managers learn to be product masters. Product masters are the leaders of products in organizations and this episode is a very special one as I have not one but three guests who are all on their way to becoming product masters. This episode came about with the help of one of my customers — Soren — who is in my IDEA Framework eCourse, which teaches the essential base of skills that lead to being a product master. We were discussing topics for this podcast and he shared how he would love to hear from other millennial product managers. He said that the experts I often interview provide valuable insights for him, but that he would also like to hear from product managers who are younger in their career and still figuring out what it means to be a product manager.

I not only thought that was a great idea but knowing Soren, I also thought he would be a great guest to share advice from his experience. He found two other young product managers so we could have a variety of experiences to learn from.

They are each in their 20’s and have been working as a product manager for 6 months to about 3 years.

Both new and more experienced product managers should listen to this discussion as there is something for all of us. Specifically, younger product managers will learn:

- Challenges product managers must deal with,

- Tips for improving your effectiveness, and

- The one thing each of the guests wish they knew about product management sooner in their careers.

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: A frequent question lately has been what tools are used by product managers and innovators. In this episode, we are addressing some tools for innovation. I’ll cover product management tools in a future episode. To discuss innovation tools, I talked to the one person who has literally written the book on innovation tools, which appropriately is also titled, Innovation Tools.

My guest and bestselling author is Even Shellshear. Evan’s focus is on industry transforming technologies and methodologies, from software to consulting. His background is in economics and game theory. He is also the founder of Simultek, a company that leverages game theory to elicit people’s true preferences.

In our discussion, product managers and innovators will learn:

using crowdsourcing as a catalyst for innovation and avoiding crowd slap,tools for early prototyping,using and avoiding problems with behavioral innovation, andbusiness model innovation.

Sean Sill, calls himself an electronics systems consultant. He's been doing product design & development for electronic hardware systems over 3 years. Has a background in theater, radio and theater production. He's also done web apps and IOT. Sean's office is in the Port Workspaces at Kaiser and is part of the Techliminal community. Sean joins Malcolm and Cindy to further discuss the thinking around the lean spec product definition.

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: Lean concepts are being applied across organizations, but what about applying them to marketing? To explore how Lean benefits marketing, I talked with someone who has helped many organizations fuse Lean practices into marketing. That person is Joe Dager. As product managers are frequently involved with aspects of marketing, I thought these concepts would be important to share, which is why I asked Joe to join me on The Everyday Innovator.

Joe Dager describes himself as the chief antagonist of Business901, a firm specializing in bringing the continuous improvement process to sales, marketing, and service.  His process thinking comes from over thirty years in marketing within a wide variety of industries as applied with Lean concepts. Joe has been part of several start-ups, a few turnarounds and now works creating digital marketing processes, primarily with SaaS-type companies.

From the discussion, product managers and innovators will learn:

what Lean marketing is,how to measure the benefits of Lean in marketing,the steps for fusing Lean into your marketing work,helpful tools to use, andhow to navigate the necessary culture change.