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: According to my guest, “Marketing at its heart is starting a conversation with someone who could be an ideal customer.” Of course, then my first question is how do we find the ideal customer for a product or service.

Thankfully, my guest, Tom Schwab, had some ideas. Tom is the founder of Interview Valet and his previous background is in medical device products.

In this interview you will learn:

Why marketing should start with the customer,How to identify the ideal customer, andWhat we can learn from the ideal customer for a product.

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: 

Research and development is tightly coupled with product management and innovation. To learn how an R&D person thinks about innovation, I talked with Dana A. Oliver, who has 30 impressive years of experience in R&D groups. He now focuses on writing and coaching, after leaving Medtronic, the medical device company, where he was the Senior Director of R&D.

He has also written two books. His first is Mantra Leadership and his second and most recent is Mantra Design.  In Mantra Design he shares 14 principles, or mantras, for innovation and developing premium priced, patent protected, and market share leading products.

We discuss a few of his mantras and then explore the future of R&D. The mantras discussed include:

Innovate, Buy or DieLearn Your Customer’s World!Innovation begins with the EyeIt Takes a Long Time to Get to Simple

Global Product Management Talk is pleased to bring you episode 091 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 episode is about virtual teams. Many of us are part of virtual teams and we have felt the pain of virtual teams that don’t work well. Virtual teams are becoming more common in organizations and especially product management and innovation where the product team is often scattered across multiple time zones.

I found someone who has worked with and learned from hundreds of virtual teams. He is currently the PMO manager at Cisco Systems, where he leads virtual teams all around the world.

He is also the author of two Amazon best-selling books. The first one is Influencing Virtual Teams: 17 Tactics That Get Things Done with Your Remote Employees. His most recent book is Don’t Reply All: 18 Email Tactics That Help You Write Better Emails and Improve Communication with Your Team. His name is Hassan Osman.

In the interview we focus on:

the nature of virtual teams,building trust, andwhat you need to do to run an effective virtual team meeting.

Global Product Management Talk is pleased to bring you episode 090 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 explored the topic of product portfolio management in previous episodes, but not from an Agile perspective. That is the topic for this episode – Agile portfolio management.

Each week I talk with a savvy insider to help us understand an aspect of product management and innovation. This time my guest is one of the very first Certified Scrum Trainers, who has been implementing Scrum in organizations for more than a decade and has another decade of experience in software technology. He is also a Principle at SolutionsIQ, a firm that helps organizations adopt Agile practices.

In this episode, product managers and innovators will learn:

the difference between product portfolio management and Agile portfolio management,how to create Agile portfolios,how to navigate some of the common issues encountered with Agile portfolio management,and the return on team an importance of keeping high-performing teams intact.

Global Product Management Talk is pleased to bring you episode 089 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 there times that product managers need to be disobedient – not do what they were asked to do? To explore the topic I spoke with Bob McGannon who has great experience with this through the lens of project management. As the purpose of a project is to develop a product or service, product managers and innovators have much they can learn from the field of project management.

Bob is vice-president of Mindavation, a company that focuses on helping businesses increase their capabilities in portfolio, program, and project management. Bob has set up project management programs on three continents. He has 25 years of IT, project management, and project analysis experience, 18 of those years with IBM.

In the discussion you’ll learn:

the value of project management,three key project management skills product managers must have,what intelligent disobedience is, andhow product managers can exercise intelligent disobedience.

Malcolm Knapp of The Engineer Accelerator talks with Cindy F. Solomon of SUPA Product Academy about the "lean spec", a product specfication requirements process that Malcolm has developed and implemented over many years of building hardware products.

This is the first in a series of conversations highlighting the issues involved in talking about this process, developing it as a product management tool, and solving the complexity of visualizing the product definition before development begins.

About Malcolm Knapp

I help small companies and individual people with defining the product they are trying to make and implementation of the electronics component of that product. In all, I have over ten years of project experience ever since I designed and built a low cost rechargeable lantern from The Millennium Villages project in 2004.

My education includes a combined BA in Science, Engineering, and Society from Pitzer College, a BS in Electrical Engineer from Columbia University and a MS in Electrical Engineering from Columbia. I chose this type of degree because politics, economics, and culture, effect what is built just as much as what is technically possible and I wanted to understand how.

http://www.engineeraccelerator.com/

The Engineer Accelerator: Saturdays & Wednesdays, September 17th – Oct 14th, Port Workspaces Oakland, CA

https://techliminal.com/product/the-engineer-accelerator/

Global Product Management Talk is pleased to bring you episode 088 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: My son got to meet his heroes. Not sports players, astronauts, or Marvel comics characters. He met the people behind Youth Digital, his favorite source for online tech courses. We traveled to their headquarters in Chapel Hills, North Carolina. What they are all about is creating the next generation of creators, focused on kids ages 8 to 14. My son discovered their courses when he was 10 and he is devouring them as fast as he can, learning about Java programming, 3D graphics and animation, computer game design, and more – and frequently laughing in the process.

While at their office, we had the opportunity to talk with Justin Richards, the CEO and founder of Youth Digital, and Aaron Sharp, the head of Product Development.

The interview serves two purposes. We explore the product management aspects of the company and I expect product managers and innovators will find the topics useful. We also discuss another topic I love – preparing the next generation to be leaders in technology and innovation – which is something their products are all about. Most of us have kids in our lives, whether they be nephews and nieces, our own children, or other children we influence and because of this, I want you to know about the work Youth Digital is doing.

Global Product Management Talk is pleased to bring you episode 087 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 enjoyed a wonderful conversation with Saeed Khan. He started the On Product Management blog and has been a career product manager, working in Toronto, Canada and Silicon Valley. He is also a frequent speaker at product management events, including ProductCamps.

I saw a presentation Saeed did on the topic of successfully using product management metrics. I wanted to explore this topic with him along with what else it takes to be a good product manager, which is what we did in this discussion.

In the interview Saeed shares four categories of metrics and his 6-stage product model:

Build It,Nail It,Scale It,Extend It,Milk It, andEnd It.

Global Product Management Talk is pleased to bring you episode 086 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: You’ve likely heard of the curse of knowledge or sometimes it is called the curse of the expert. It occurs when our knowledge leads us down predictable paths, likely not considering other possible solutions to problems but only those that are familiar to us. This is cognitive bias and is the topic I asked my guest about, which lead to discussing open innovation and how to manufacture serendipity. His name is Kevin Stark and he is the VP of Technology Solutions at NineSigma, a global innovation firm. They have helped Kraft, NFL, NASA, L’Oréal, Unilever, PepsiCo, Pfizer and other companies create an open innovation workplace, leading to breakthrough products.

As you will hear towards the end of the interview, many of these companies share their stories using open innovation on the NineSights website – a great resource for learning what they did. The link is below.

In this discussion, product managers can learn:

how to identify and avoid cognitive bias,how to create an open innovation workplace,problems to anticipate and avoid.

Cindy F. Solomon chats with Amy Lightholder about the value of hands-on immersion into learning Agile and managing products.