Product Mastery Now for Product Managers, Leaders, and Innovators

I’m siting down with innovation expert Mike Dalton to discuss why capable companies overcommit to too many projects and struggle to move any of them forward. He reveals practical frameworks and tools to help product leaders focus on the right projects, avoid resource overload, and deliver more value to both customers and organizations.

Picture a customer calling and asking, “Where’s my new product?” And you don’t have a good answer. That’s the situation a plant leader at Danfoss described being in, before today’s guest showed up. Three months later, on-time delivery was over 90%. 

Our guest, Mike Dalton, spent 23 years inside SC Johnson, running the P&L for its most profitable business unit, before he set out to answer a key question: Why do capable companies keep moving fifty projects an inch forward instead of five projects a mile? He answered that question at my favorite innovation conference — PDMA’s Ignite Innovation Summit. His books, Simplifying Innovation and Unlocking Innovation Productivity, also provide valuable insights for product innovators and managers. 

I wanted to have this conversation because every product leader I talk to is being asked to do more with less. Mike’s answer isn’t “work harder.” It’s “stop starting so much.” And to get there, you just need a few tools, including a simple pipeline control mechanism that can meaningfully increase how many projects finish. We’ll learn about that and more. 

Problem of Too Many Projects
Organizations routinely take on more projects than they have resources for. This leads to spreading teams thin, multitasking inefficiencies, and slower overall product delivery. Mike emphasizes that throwing more resources at the problem is never the answer. Instead, the key is focusing existing resources on a few prioritized projects.

Choosing the Right Projects
Selecting the right projects to focus on is central to increasing innovation productivity. Mike describes a customer value lens for vetting opportunities, ensuring products are both valuable to customers and profitable for the organization. He warns against ideas driven solely by internal executives, advocating for direct customer engagement to identify high-value unmet needs.

Portfolio and Resource Management
Mike explores how to balance a portfolio of projects based on strategic importance, risk, and expected ROI. He suggests using resource bandwidth as a limiting factor—most organizations can only run about a third of the projects they attempt efficiently. He recommends zero-based project budgeting and prioritizing projects by return per unit of effort, with less promising projects placed in the backlog or dropped.

Improving Project Execution
Execution challenges are often rooted in resource overload rather than a lack of project management skills. Mike describes the need for mechanisms like early warning dashboards to track project risks and make sure shared resources are allocated to the most critical initiatives, not just those championed by the loudest internal voices. This fosters focus and better organizational outcomes.

Practical Starting Points
For leaders looking to address project overload, Mike recommends tools such as a virtual drum for resource planning (with a downloadable resource shared in the episode). Categorize projects as small, medium, and large and determine how many of each size your organization can run at full speed at one time. Monitor total work-in-progress (WIP) to help visualize limits, identify focus areas, and create a foundation for real portfolio discussion and prioritization.

“Most hack away at the branches while few strike at the roots.” – paraphrase of Henry David Thoreau

Michael A. Dalton Managing Director, Guided Innovation Group, LLC Mike Dalton is the founder of Guided Innovation Group and the architect of the AcceleTrak OS, an operating system designed to transform your gated development process into a predictable engine for cash flow. With a career spanning over four decades, Mike specializes in helping technology and industrial leaders apply the Theory of Constraints (TOC) to accelerate innovation flow and drive ROI. Prior to founding Guided Innovation, Mike spent 20 years in leadership at SC Johnson, where he served as General Manager, Product Director, and Plant Manager for their specialty chemicals division the fastest-growing and most profitable segment of the $10 billion portfolio. It was here that he first pioneered the application of TOC levers to the innovation pipeline, proving that winning isn’t about keeping every developer busy, but about moving high-impact projects to market with speed and precision. An industry authority on product portfolio management and innovation productivity, Mike is the author of two Amazon best-selling books: Simplifying Innovation and Unlocking Innovation Productivity. His methodologies have helped organizations cut time-to-revenue in half while significantly increasing the volume of successful product launches. Mike is a frequent contributor to leading publications, including Industry Week, CFO Magazine, and Research-Technology Management. He is a sought-after speaker for industry associations, where he shares his field-tested framework for making new products a predictable source of growth. 

Thank you for taking the journey to product mastery and learning with me from the successes and failures of product innovators, managers, and developers. If you enjoyed the discussion, help out a fellow product manager by sharing it using the social media buttons you see below.

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I’m sharing insights from my presentation at the PDMA’s Ignite Innovation Conference, focusing on how organizations can overcome the seven most common weaknesses in product innovation. Drawing from decades of hands-on experience and the PDMA Body of Knowledge, I detail actionable steps for product professionals to boost their effectiveness and drive better outcomes for their teams and organizations.

Last week, at the PDMA’s Ignite Innovation Conference, I gave a short presentation on overcoming the seven most common weaknesses in product innovation. Today, I want to bring that presentation to you as well.

The Product Development and Management Association’s (PDMA) has been researching product innovation and product management for 50 years. They provides resources for product managers about how the most innovative companies innovate, including the book Product Development and Management Body of Knowledge, which I have contributed to each edition of, including as a co-author on the current edition.

PDMA organizes the body of knowledge of product management into seven knowledge areas. In this presentation, I’m talking about what I’ve learned teaching these seven knowledge areas over the past two decades. I train product teams through the Rapid Product Mastery (RPM) Experience. At the end of each RPM Experience, I create a next steps report, including my observations of the team’s weaknesses and how to address them. The teams also list the processes, tools, and concepts they believe would most help them deliver products customers love. In this presentation, I’ll share the most common weakness identified in these reports from each of the seven knowledge areas.

Use the personal scorecard I created to follow along and identify your own weaknesses:

1. Product Innovation Management
Most frequent weakness: Product managers are acting as project managers. They say, “I used to have interactions with customers, but not anymore.”
Recommendation: Re-establish direct customer contact.

2. Strategy
Most frequent weakness: Product managers don’t know the strategic objectives or priorities.
Recommendation: Make the strategy visible and share the strategic objectives frequently.

3. Portfolio Management
Most frequent weakness: Lack of clarity around how projects are selected.
Recommendation:  Have an explicit and visible method for understanding the criteria for selecting a project. Select against strategic buckets. (Breakthrough, Platform, Derivative, Support)

4. Process
Most frequent weakness: A process for building exists, but the front end is missing or undisciplined, and the process gets dropped under pressure.
Recommendation: Put a more disciplined front end in front of delivery, focused on discovery and scoping. Validate the solution.

5. Design & Development
Most frequent weakness: A thin ideation, prototyping, and validation toolkit is used, with little agreement on which tools are helpful.
Recommendation: Build a shared toolkit that spans all three stages — ideation, prototyping, validation — and get team agreement on which tool to use when.

6. Market Research
Most frequent weakness: Sales is used as a substitute for customer research, and there is no synthesized voice of the customer.
Recommendation: Separate customer discovery from sales and give product managers direct customer contact. Synthesize the voice of the customer for each segment and share it with the whole product team. Keep the language the customer shares.

7. Culture, Teams, & Leadership
Most frequent weakness: The culture is siloed and top-down, while the product managers want cross-functional collaboration.
Recommendation: Break the silos and build cross-functional teams.

4 Repeated Themes
1. Clear strategy
2. Customer research
3. Supportive culture
4. Discovery process

Thank you for taking the journey to product mastery and learning with me from the successes and failures of product innovators, managers, and developers. If you enjoyed the discussion, help out a fellow product manager by sharing it using the social media buttons you see below.

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Dr. Anita Friis Sommer joins me to discuss why most corporate innovation initiatives fail despite decades of process frameworks like Agile, Stage-Gate, and Lean Startup. Drawing on her experience co-developing the Agile Stage-Gate model and leading innovation at LEGO and the Novo Nordisk Foundation CO2 Research Center, Anita Friis Sommer shares practical insights from her new book, Mission-Driven Innovation. She emphasizes that true innovation success comes not from a single methodology but from aligning seven critical organizational dimensions. The conversation covers mission-driven leadership, creating empowering systems for innovation, and how budgeting, governance, and digital enablement play a key role.

Here’s an uncomfortable number: Somewhere between 70 and 90 percent of corporate innovation initiatives never deliver the impact they promised — and that’s after decades of Agile, Stage-Gate, Lean Startup, and other frameworks we’ve thrown at the problem. Our guest today helped create one of those frameworks. And her argument is that the method was never the thing holding your success back.

Our guest is Dr. Anita Friis Sommer. She co-developed the Agile–Stage-Gate model with Dr. Bob Cooper, work that earned her the Maurice Holland Award twice. She spent over a decade at the LEGO Group leading sustainable operations at global scale, and today she’s the chief operating officer of the Novo Nordisk Foundation CO₂ Research Center, where she’s helping turn carbon-capture science into technology the world can actually use. She’s brought all of that together in a new book called Mission-Driven Innovation: How to Lead Technology in a Complex World. She will help you understand what actually determines innovation success and how to add the missing pieces to your organization.

Why Innovation Frameworks Aren’t Enough
Anita explains that processes like Agile Stage-Gate introduce helpful structure and flexibility, but simply installing a new methodology does not guarantee repeatable innovation success. The underlying organizational system often inhibits these frameworks from realizing their full potential.

Seven Dimensions of Mission-Driven Innovation
Anita outlines the seven dimensions that drive innovation success:

“You cannot think your way into a new way of acting. You have to act your way into a new way of thinking.” – Jørgen Vig Knudstorp, CEO of LEGO Group

Anita Friis Sommer is an innovation leader, researcher, and author focused on helping organizations turn promising ideas and technologies into successful products and business outcomes. An Associate Professor at Aarhus University and former innovation leader at LEGO, she co-developed the Agile–Stage-Gate approach with Dr. Robert G. Cooper and has spent much of her career studying how organizations can accelerate product development and innovation. Her latest work expands that perspective beyond individual methods to the wider organizational system required for innovation to succeed. In her new book, Mission-Driven Innovation, Anita shows how aligning purpose, leadership, strategy, governance, innovation processes, and investment can help product and innovation leaders move faster, engage their people, and create both meaningful impact and profitable growth. 

Thank you for taking the journey to product mastery and learning with me from the successes and failures of product innovators, managers, and developers. If you enjoyed the discussion, help out a fellow product manager by sharing it using the social media buttons you see below.

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I’m welcoming back Ben Lamorte, veteran OKR coach, to discuss his new book Start With You: Go Beyond Prototyping. Get Clarity Before You Commit. Our conversation centers on how product professionals can use decision analysis and introspection to shift from endlessly prototyping their lives to making bolder, more authentic career decisions reflective of their true selves. Ben shares his personal journey, lessons learned from working in OKRs, and his Identity Blueprint tool for individual career clarity.

My guest today was on the show about two years ago, and he gave us one of the best conversations we’ve had on getting an organization clear on what actually matters. Ben Lamorte, the most experienced OKR coach and founder of OKRs.com, is back, and this time the subject isn’t your company’s goals. It’s yours. 

Ben has a new book called Start With You: Go Beyond Prototyping. Get Clarity Before You Commit and it makes a contrarian argument for product professionals. We’ve built our careers on prototyping and iteration — test, learn, adjust, repeat. Ben says that’s the right way to develop a product, and the right way to run the first half of your career. But by mid-career, he argues, you’ve already gathered the data about yourself. More experiments won’t help. What you need now is the language to name what you already know, and the courage to commit to it. He’s taken the decision-analysis framework,  information, values, alternatives, that he learned from his Stanford professor Ron Howard, and applied it to the question of what you do next with your professional life. And given the pace of change hitting product people, this is a very important discussion to hear. 

Personal Reflection on Career
After years coaching over 200 organizations on OKRs, Ben experienced a professional slowdown, leading him to apply rigorous decision frameworks inward. When his daughter asked him, “Would you do your work tomorrow if you didn’t get paid?” he began to reflect on personal fulfillment and career direction. This catalyzed his transition from organizational OKRs to helping individuals, especially mid-career professionals, define what truly matters for themselves and make value-aligned commitments.

Ben’s New Book, Start with You
Ben’s book helps professionals identify their identity capital, which includes experiences, credentials, relationships, reputation, and skills. Using a gardens metaphor, Ben describes how we accumulate different types of identity capital: thriving gardens (energizing skills), spent gardens (skills we’ve outgrown), dormant gardens (skills/experiences shelved away), overharvested gardens (skills depleted by overuse), and undervalued gardens (assets we overlook). He challenges readers to think about their dormant identity capital — a skill or experience from their past that isn’t currently being put to use but could rise up at the right moment.

Decision Analysis: Information, Values, Alternatives
Ben leverages the decision analysis framework taught by Ron Howard at Stanford — information, values, and alternatives — to empower career decisions. Like a three-legged stool, making a decision requires three legs: strengths (identity capital), values (what you need and want), and career direction (on or off the “menu” of existing jobs). This approach helps product professionals move beyond defaulting to what’s available and design new possibilities tailored to themselves.

Get Clarity Before You Commit
While prototyping and iteration are essential for product development (and early careers), Ben challenges the dogma of always “prototyping your life.” Making big life decisions is not prototyping; it’s committing. Ben’s book helps people get clarity before committing to a big decision.

The Identity Blueprint
Ben’s Identity Blueprint is an AI-powered self-reflection tool that synthesizes personal stories into a report illuminating your strengths, values, and undervalued possibilities. It’s designed to help individuals gain visceral clarity before making major commitments, whether shifting careers or reigniting their passion for current work.

Don’t Follow Your Passion; Find It
Many young people are told to find their passion, but it’s nearly impossible to know your passion before you get good at doing something. Ben’s book helps readers find the things that are meaningful to them and fit with their identity capital. It gives you a framework for bringing your true self into the world. This can lead to finding your passion.

Surround Yourself with the Right People 
Ben says that the most important overlooked part of loving your work is finding the direction that allows you to surround yourself with the people that you want to be surrounded with. The people around you will change you. In Ben’s opinion, it is better to have a job you don’t prefer and work with people you can form good long-term relationships with than to have a job you like but work in isolation or with colleagues you don’t want to be with.

“The job board is not a map of your possibilities. It is a catalog of problems that companies that don’t care about you are trying to solve.” – Ben Lamorte in Start with You

Ben Lamorte is the founder of OKRs.com and creator of the Identity Blueprint. He has coached the OKR methodology for twelve years across more than 200 organizations and 20 countries. 

Ben is the author of The OKRs Field Book  (Wiley, 2022) and co-author of Objectives and Key Results  (Wiley, 2016) with Paul Niven. Beyond Prototyping Your Life is his third book and the first of the Assertified Series. 

He holds a master’s degree in Management Science and Engineering from Stanford, where he later taught decision analysis to graduate students. 

Thank you for taking the journey to product mastery and learning with me from the successes and failures of product innovators, managers, and developers. If you enjoyed the discussion, help out a fellow product manager by sharing it using the social media buttons you see below.

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I’m sitting down with retail innovator Ron Johnson, to discuss how he created the Apple Store, the importance of serving customers, and what product managers can learn about creating memorable experiences. Ron shares lessons from decades in retail and actionable takeaways for building lasting customer relationships.

The internet was supposed to kill the retail store. That was the conventional wisdom back in 1999 — physical retail was done, the future was online ecommerce. Then a kid from Minnesota who grew up loving stores sat down with Steve Jobs and built what would become the most productive retail space on the planet.

Our guest today is Ron Johnson. He created the Apple Store. Before that, he brought designer Michael Graves to millions of shoppers at Target, and after Apple he took the CEO seat at JCPenney and later founded the retail startup Enjoy. Across three decades he’s learned as much from one very public failure as from a historic success — and he has strong views on what actually makes people love the things we build, and why that matters even more in the age of AI, which is the focus of his book, SHOP DIFFERENT: How Retail Revealed Apple’s Genius.

Service Over Sales
Ron reflects on how his personal geography due to his upbringing in Minnesota, with its emphasis on kindness and serving the community, shaped his approach to retail leadership. Valuing service over sales was a guiding principle throughout his career—an idea that would eventually underpin the Apple Store experience.

Loving Customers as a Service Strategy
At Apple, Ron told Steve Jobs that their service strategy would be loving customers. Apple describes this as enriching lives. Ron explains how empowering employees to personalize service, listening to customer needs, and fostering a culture of authentic care created a contagious environment of customer-centered innovation.

Empowering Employees to Understand Customer Needs
Rather than following a specific sales script, Apple Store employees seek to find out why each customer came into the store and what the gap is between the customer and the thing they want to accomplish. Then, the employee’s job is to fill that gap. Ron describes this process as an act of love, as the employees are securing the customers’ good and enriching their lives.

Product Insights from the Store Floor
Apple Store employees come to know customers very well, and this knowledge generates many useful ideas for the company. When Ron was at Apple, employees could communicate their ideas directly to him. He met all the store managers, and the store managers met all their employees. This company culture allowed employees to easily share ideas. Ron describes how knowledge from the store floor informed both store improvements and product decisions, like rapidly deploying solutions to issues with the iPhone 4.

Prototyping the Apple Store
Apple first built a prototype of the Apple Store in their warehouse and used the space to imagine the customer experience in the store. Apple doesn’t directly ask their customers what they think of a new product, because it’s hard for customers to understand new innovations. Instead, they observe customers to get to know their needs and experiences. Famously, Apple values attention to detail, starting with the unboxing experience.

Enduring Value of Human Connection
When the internet was developed, some people predicted that ecommerce would completely replace retail stores. Ron explains that physical stores remain relevant because they are centers of human connection, community, and discovery. Likewise, he offers optimism about AI’s role in amplifying rather than replacing the need for personal expertise and meaningful interaction.

Apple Store’s North Star Metric
In the early days of Apple Stores, their North Star metric was growing foot traffic, not just sales, as a leading indicator of long-term success. Ron understood that patience was required to let in-store customer experiences translate into customer loyalty and eventual purchases.

Building an Emotional Connection to the Product
The willingness of customers to wait in long lines outside Apple Stores showcases the emotional connection they have to Apple products. Being part of that experience provides value to customers that can’t be measured.

“All innovation begins in imagination.” – Ron Johnson

Ron grew up in Edina, Minnesota — two miles from the first indoor shopping mall in the world, Southdale Center. He went into retail out of Harvard Business School, picking the stockroom at Mervyn’s in Los Angeles over Goldman Sachs in New York City. After five years at Mervyn’s, he joined Target, where he worked with architect Michael Graves to bring good design to everyone. That initiative earned him Steve’s attention and the opportunity to create the Apple Store. He later attempted to reinvent the department store at JCPenney, and though it didn’t go as he’d hoped, he learned more in 24 months of failure than he did in 24 years of success.

Thank you for taking the journey to product mastery and learning with me from the successes and failures of product innovators, managers, and developers. If you enjoyed the discussion, help out a fellow product manager by sharing it using the social media buttons you see below.

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I’m welcoming back Chris Spiek, Chief Product Officer at Autobooks and co-founder of the Rewired Group, to demystify Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD) interviews. Chris shares his journey to developing JTBD with Bob Moesta, offers practical tips for switch interviews, and emphasizes the importance of understanding customer struggle to drive innovation.

Eleven years ago on this show, Chris Spiek explained why people buy a Snickers bar, which is a completely different reason from why they buy a Milky Way. The framework was called Jobs to be Done (JTBD), and back then many product managers had never heard of it. Today everyone knows the words, but fewer can actually run a JTBD interview. After this episode, that will change for you.

Chris Spiek is Chief Product Officer at Autobooks and co-founder of The Re-Wired Group, where he and Bob Moesta spent more than a decade building Jobs to be Done into a complete product development framework. He co-authored The Jobs-to-be-Done Handbook, his work is featured in Clayton Christensen’s book, Competing Against Luck, and he has helped teams at Basecamp, Facebook, Intercom, Dropbox, and others understand why customers switch to their products. He teaches the switch interview and has built an AI tool that analyzes those interviews.

JTBD as a Framework to Move Beyond Guesswork
Chris shares how his early career in building custom software exposed the difficulty of predicting which projects would succeed. He was building applications for Bob Moesta, who had a incredible ability to understand customers’ problems. Bob and Chris built the Jobs-to-be-Done framework as a systematic method to understand customers’ needs and focus on solving them rather than on building product features.

Switch Interviews
Jobs-to-be-Done interviews, also known as switch interviews, uncover the reasons customers switch from one product to another. They investigate customers’ struggles, definitions of progress, and the trade-offs they’re willing to make, providing clarity on how to improve products and customer experience.

Real-World Examples of Switch Interviews
Chris describes how he used switch interviews at AutoBooks, a company that sells accounting software for small businesses. He interviewed current users and asked them why they decided to use AutoBooks software. Surprisingly, they found that many customers weren’t using the software primarily for its automated bookkeeping capability; instead, they had switched to AutoBooks because they wanted to be able to accept credit card payments via invoice without using a third party. This insight allowed the product team to better align their marketing with the jobs the customers were using the software for.

Practical Tips for Customer Interviews
Chris recommends that product managers practice their interview skills by interviewing a colleague or friend about a recent decision to make a big purchase. Get into the details about what they bought, when they bought it, and the trade-offs that went into their decision-making process.

With some practice, product managers can learn to resist the urge to get into talking about technical details of their product and just listen to the customer’s story instead. Chris tells his teams that they can be in either supply or demand mode but don’t mix them. During customer interviews, they’re focused on demand and they aren’t talking about their solution.

Chris recommends asking customers for details about their story — take them back to the moment and the place where they decided to make a purchase. One technique that is helpful for this is to tell the interviewee that they can imagine you’re producing a documentary about them, so you’ll ask about very specific details like the weather or exact date.

Chris suggests about an hour for a customer interview. If you have the opportunity, have another person in the room to take notes and make observations you may have missed.

A small number of interviews is often sufficient. Chris’s team sometimes makes product decisions with just 2-4 interviews. If your organization is new to customer interviews, you may need 10-12 interviews to convince yourself and others that you’ve found a pattern.

Analyzing Interviews with AI
To accelerate actionable insights, Chris is using an AI tool that analyzes interview transcripts, extracts key motivations, and provides feedback on interviewing technique.

“The struggling moment is the seed of innovation!” – Bob Moesta

Chris Spiek started his career as a software developer before turning his attention to what it takes to build great products. In 2005, he co-founded the Re-Wired Group with Bob Moesta, where they developed Jobs to be Done from a footnote in Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma into a complete product development framework. His product development work spans nearly every industry, and his passion for software has led him to work with product teams at Basecamp, Intercom, and Facebook. He is currently Chief Product Officer at Autobooks, a fintech company serving small businesses. 

Thank you for taking the journey to product mastery and learning with me from the successes and failures of product innovators, managers, and developers. If you enjoyed the discussion, help out a fellow product manager by sharing it using the social media buttons you see below.

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Penny Wise, former 3M executive, and Michelle Jones, innovation systems architect at Stage-Gate International, discuss how innovation leaders can navigate uncertainty, balance governance, and build trust in their organizations. They share practical insights from decades of innovation research and experience, preview their upcoming PDMA conference workshops, and discuss ways organizations like 3M foster a culture of entrepreneurship and collaboration.

Two things nearly every product leader wants: the innovation track record of a company like 3M, and a way to govern innovation that actually helps instead of getting in the way. Today I have someone from each of those worlds. Penny Wise is a former executive at 3M, with nearly three decades there — including as president of 3M Canada, as well as a global vice president of marketing. Michelle Jones is an innovation systems architect and senior partner at Stage-Gate International, where she helps organizations measure their new product innovation system against the hallmarks of the best performers and fix what’s holding them back. At the PDMA conference this October, the two of them are facilitating a Leaders’ Roundtable and a Benchmarking Workshop. Today is the first of two conversations. We’ll look at the leadership and governance challenges they’re seeing leaders encounter. Then, in a few weeks, after the conference, we’ll come back to learn what surfaced with the leaders that attended. 

Leaders’ Roundtable at the PDMA Conference
Michelle and Penny are facilitating a leaders’ roundtable, which will bring together some of the most influential and trusted voices in new product development. They’ll discuss how their teams are managing the many uncertainties of today’s world such as demographic shifts, rapid technological advances including AI, and geopolitical instability.

Live Benchmarking Session
Stage-Gate International and PDMA have the world’s largest databases on benchmarking in innovation and product development. At the conference, Penny, Michelle, and Dr. Bob Cooper, will facilitate a session that dives deep into benchmarking, focusing on governance of innovation. Participants will assess their organizations’ performance in each benchmark, and the facilitators will introduce emerging practices in benchmarking.

Innovation Leadership in Times of Uncertainty
Leaders may be tempted to be paralyzed by uncertainty, but Michelle points out that periods of uncertainty also offer the biggest opportunities. Innovation leaders who can operate in uncertainty have the best chance for the biggest rewards. Product innovators are well equipped to help the rest of their organizations deal with rapid change, particularly related to AI.

Impact of AI on Innovation
Artificial intelligence is rapidly changing both back-office operations and front-end product opportunities. Penny points out that while AI creates a flood of new ideas and synthetic data to mine, it also presents challenges for prioritization and aligning new product efforts with company strategy. Leaders must view AI strategically, ensuring it supports larger business objectives. Penny and Michelle recommend that companies use the Stage-Gate process to test and iterate on their use of AI.

Governance in Stage-Gate
Michelle describes how leadership and governance have been forgotten in the Stage-Gate process. Over the past few years, all innovation disciplines have contributed to make Stage-Gate more efficient, but in the sprint for speed, the leader’s role has been lost. Michelle has observed that organizations that continue winning are the ones that haven’t set governance aside but instead knit all the innovation methods into a sophisticated governance process.

Portfolio Chaos
Recently, when talking with companies, Michelle hears that they are experiencing “portfolio chaos.” Product leaders don’t know what’s in their portfolio or how they’re contributing to the overall organizational strategy. An abundance of ideas from AI amplifies this problem when there aren’t governance systems in place to help leaders make good decisions to curate their portfolios intentionally.

Innovation Culture at 3M
Penny and Michelle describe how the innovation culture at 3M is intentionally designed to support innovation and nurture an entrepreneurial spirit. They use governance wisely, to avoid chaos while not squashing innovation. The company focuses on understanding customers’ needs and building the right products. Like many large organizations, 3M has to balance revolutionary innovations with incremental improvements. Big organizations have no shortage of new ideas, but they must have a solid strategy to decide which ideas move forward and help everyone feel that their ideas are valued. At 3M, anyone can generate an idea, and others in the organization are expected to quickly connect them to someone who can help develop those ideas. They also host open technical poster sessions to facilitate collaboration.

A few years ago, 3M and the U.S. Department of Defense swapped Stage-Gate leaders for a year. Both organizations wanted to learn from each other’s strategic challenges, processes, and unmet needs. Michelle describes this as an example of 3M’s dedication to innovation and long-term success.

Governance as a Trust-Building Mechanism
Governance is a trust-building mechanism. When teams trust their leaders, their performance is accelerated because they know what to expect and have permission to try new things and fail intelligently. Research shows that it is best for product leaders to manage the process and governance with a heavy hand and manage the projects and people with a light hand.

“As go the gates, so does the process.” – Dr. Robert Cooper 

“An idea is not an innovation. You have to make a product and test it against  all the customer applications. Then when you sell it and customers buy it a second time, then you’ve got an innovation. You’ve changed their buying habits.” – attributed to Art Fry

Michelle L. Jones is a Managing Partner at Stage‑Gate International and one of the world’s leading authorities on architecting and implementing high‑performing, enterprise‑wide new product development and innovation management systems. For more than two decades, she has worked alongside Dr Robert Cooper, Dr Scott Edgett, and hundreds of leading innovators to research, evolve, and deploy the most influential innovation frameworks shaping corporate growth strategies today.

Renowned as the foremost expert in tailoring and implementing Stage‑Gate® Hybrid systems, Michelle has led more successful enterprise innovation transformations than anyone else globally. She partners with leadership teams across North America, Europe, China, and South America—including some of the world’s most discerning and performance‑driven organizations— to modernize portfolio and gate governance, strengthen decision‑making discipline, and embed innovation capabilities that scale. Her work helps organizations align strategy, culture, and operating models to unlock sustainable growth and accelerate value creation.

Michelle brings a rare combination of strategic insight and practical implementation expertise, grounded in more than 30 years of experience in consulting, R&D management, post‑merger integration, and operational leadership. She integrates change leadership, organizational behavior, and systems thinking to drive adoption, embed new leadership behaviors, and ensure long‑term system durability.

At PDMA’s 50th Anniversary Conference, Michelle will lead an interactive workshop on the hallmarks of next‑generation governance—what world‑class gate governance looks like today, how leading companies are elevating decision quality and portfolio performance, and why governance is re‑emerging as the critical backbone of high‑growth, high‑performance innovation organizations.

Penny Wise is a senior Marketing and Corporate Affairs executive known for creating clarity and generating momentum in complex environments. Over her career at 3M, she held global leadership roles spanning brand strategy, marketing, new product marketing, communications, public policy, marketing transformation and P&L management, including serving as President of 3M Canada. She is recognized for mobilizing leaders and unifying teams around shared priorities and integrating work across business, marketing, brand, corporate affairs, and communications to deliver enterprise strategy. Penny has led major transformation initiatives, including modernizing marketing systems in a $12B Business Group and guiding the global relaunch of 3M’s brand platform. Her leadership has delivered impactful commercial, reputational, and regulatory outcomes. Penny has been recognized as one of Canada’s 100 Most Powerful Women and is a recipient of the Canadian Chamber of Commerce Business Leader of the Year Award. She holds an MBA in Marketing from the Schulich School of Business at York University.

Thank you for taking the journey to product mastery and learning with me from the successes and failures of product innovators, managers, and developers. If you enjoyed the discussion, help out a fellow product manager by sharing it using the social media buttons you see below.

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Stefanie Whittington, Senior Product Manager at Winnebago, joins me to discuss her product management experience building rugged, off-grid adventure RVs. She shares lessons learned from transitioning from software marketing to physical product management, the importance of deep customer empathy, shaped both by her full-time RV lifestyle and hands-on user research, and how cross-industry experiences can lead to innovative consumer-focused products. The episode provides actionable takeaways for product managers considering industry transitions and striving to create products customers truly love.

Can you become a better product professional by changing industries? I’ve talked with several who have, and there are many benefits, but you have to navigate it well. Our guest, Stefanie Whittington, went from marketing at Microsoft to leading a physical product that has to survive 100,000 miles of trail, extreme heat and cold, and the honest opinions of people camping in the backcountry. What does a move like that teach you about product management and how does it make you a better product professional?

Stefanie will help us answer that. She is a senior product manager at Winnebago, where she led development of the ARKA — the company’s newest RV — an off-grid adventure truck built for people who want to get far off the map and stay there. Stefanie has an MBA and a background that runs through product-related leadership roles, including time at Microsoft, and she has now moved into product for one of the most recognized names in RVs.

From Marketing to Product Management
Stefanie became a product management at Winnebago after living as a full-time RVer, an experience that gave her authentic, firsthand empathy for the customers she now serves. This unique perspective helps her lead successful product teams and bridge the gap between user needs and manufacturing realities. She develops deep customer insights by spending time talking to customers in the real world and seeing how they use their RVs. Unlike many RV companies, Winnebago does not copy their competitors. Instead, they start with understanding their customers’ needs and design products that meet those needs.

Navigating an Industry Shift as a Product Manager
Before Winnebago, Stefanie worked in software, so transitioning to developing a physical product was a learning experience. Unlike software, hardware changes require long lead times and careful coordination with manufacturing and supply chains. Stefanie approached her new role with humility and curiosity and leaned on experienced teammates to rapidly build the domain knowledge required to lead in a new industry.

Customer Insights for the Winnebago ARKA
When developing the ARKA, Winnebago’s new off-grid adventure vehicle, Stefanie took an unbranded prototype to an RV expo, where target customers toured the build and gave candid feedback. These real-world interactions—watching customers use the product, asking about their routines, and test-driving the unit herself—revealed pain points and improvement areas that would never surface in a boardroom or a focus group. Stefanie also tested the prototype herself over hundreds of miles of different terrain to finds its failure points.

Managing Stakeholder Opinions
While developing ARKA, Stefanie’s team had to manage many stakeholders’ interests. Stefanie always returned to clearly defined customer use cases and core product requirements. The project’s guiding pillar, “everything you need and nothing you don’t,” helped her and the team make tough calls, resist feature creep, and keep the focus on only those things that enable customers to get out into the backcountry.

“Not all those who wander are lost.” – J.R.R. Tolkien, Lord of the Rings

Stefanie is a builder, strategist, and hands-on leader who loves bringing complex products to life from the ground up, currently leading the strategy, P&L, and development for Winnebago’s adventure platforms, including the launch of our off-grid ARKA adventure truck. Blending her background as a marketing executive in high-growth tech with expertise in user-centric design, go-to-market, and portfolio strategy, she thrives on tackling high-friction challenges and turning customer insights into market-defining products.

Thank you for taking the journey to product mastery and learning with me from the successes and failures of product innovators, managers, and developers. If you enjoyed the discussion, help out a fellow product manager by sharing it using the social media buttons you see below.

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In this episode, I’m interviewing Brooke Rennison, Emerging Technology Manager at BMW, about building and scaling an internal innovation system at BMW’s IT Tech Office in the Americas. Brooke shares how her team empowers 40,000 employees to participate in innovation using structured processes, training, and partnerships with universities, startups, and big tech. She also covers lessons learned, the importance of feedback, managing the innovation funnel, and how a small team can drive large-scale change across a global organization.

Open innovation has become very popular as a way for organizations to bring in external capabilities — partner with startups, tap universities, bring in the best outside technology. But, actual outcomes have been hit and miss, producing helpful results for some companies and being a distraction for others. The hard part isn’t meeting interesting startups — it’s having a repeatable way to find the right ones, evaluate their technology honestly, and actually turn it into something the business ships.

My guest has successfully done exactly that at the BMW Group. Brooke Rennison is an Emerging Technology Manager at BMW, leading innovation strategy within the IT Tech Office. She’s been with BMW since 2011, came up through data and analytics, and today she builds the roadmap that moves emerging-technology ideas from concept into reality — always with an eye on real business value. If you’ve ever wondered how a complex company absorbs an outside idea and makes it real, that’s what we’re getting into.

Establishing an Innovation Mission and System at BMW:
Brooke details how the BMW IT Tech Office set out to foster a culture of innovation by clearly defining its vision: to build innovative leaders, embrace both breakthrough and incremental change, and stay ahead of market trends. By creating structured innovation programs, including open innovation platforms, university partnerships, and startup engagements, the team ensures new ideas can flow from conception to implementation.

BMW’s Open Innovation Ideation Process:
BMW’s version of “open innovation” means giving all 40,000 BMW employees worldwide the opportunity to submit, discuss, and develop ideas. The innovation strategy team focuses on bringing in novel technologies and ideas that are not currently available at BMW. Using a digital crowd innovation platform, employees can propose solutions to specific challenges. The process is reinforced by structured feedback and a commitment to ensuring ideas receive real consideration, motivating repeated participation from innovators across the business.

Pre-Screening:
Promising ideas enter BMW’s internal incubator, where they are assessed and developed using a stage-gate process with Technical Readiness Levels (TRLs), a model borrowed from NASA. The ideas enter a pre-screening phase, where the team does research to see which external partners could help develop the idea.

Leadership Buy-In:
The next step is gateway check 1, where IT and business VPs and other leaders approve the project and provide resources. This step ensures strong top-down leadership buy-in and project accountability.

Validation:
The team continues to develop the project using the the design thinking tactics of desirability, viability, and feasibility. They also start basic prototyping. After 12 weeks, the project goes through another gateway check.

Pilot:
After a final pilot phase, the IT team transfers the product to the appropriate product team.

Design Thinking and Organizational Training:
To develop internal innovation leaders, Brooke’s team runs design workshops and offers web-based training for BMW employees. These training sessions teach design thinking methods, entrepreneurship skills, and help employees explore their ideas in greater depth, fostering creativity and a shared language around innovation and digitalization.

Leveraging External Partnerships:
The BMW innovation system collaborates with universities, startups (via the BMW Startup Garage), and big tech companies. These partnerships are strategically matched to BMW’s needs, allowing the company to access new technology, capabilities, and perspectives while maintaining internal core competencies.

“It’s okay to be stuck, but it’s not okay to stay stuck.” – Brooke Rennison

Brooke Rennison leads Open Innovation within the BMW IT Tech Office, with a focus on designing and operationalizing enterprise scale innovation processes. Brooke’s work centers on building repeatable systems that connect external ecosystems with internal R&D and business execution. With experience spanning technology scouting, ecosystem partnerships, and innovation enablement, Brooke specializes in turning Open Innovation from an aspiration into a measurable, process driven capability. Brooke also leads the Innovation Center of Excellence (CoE), enabling distributed innovation execution across business units through shared processes and governance.

Thank you for taking the journey to product mastery and learning with me from the successes and failures of product innovators, managers, and developers. If you enjoyed the discussion, help out a fellow product manager by sharing it using the social media buttons you see below.

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Anshul Garg, Principal Product Manager – Tech at Amazon and author of The Four Phases of Product Leadership, shares his practical framework for adapting leadership styles to each stage of the product lifecycle. We explore how product leaders can avoid becoming bottlenecks by flexing their approach as products move from discovery to maturity. Learn how to match your leadership to your product’s evolution and empower your teams for success.

Here’s a reason good product leaders stall out: The leadership style that made them successful at one product stage becomes the very thing holding them and their product back at the next stage. The leadership a product needs in its scrappy, ambiguous early days is not the leadership it needs when it’s scaling — or when it’s mature and needs renewing. Our guest has led product across global organizations and now leads product at Amazon, and he has built a practical framework for matching how you lead to the phase your product is in. His name is Anshul Garg, Principal Product Manager – Tech at Amazon and author of the book The Four Phases of Product Leadership.

Why Product Leadership Styles Need to Change with the Product
Anshul describes how product leaders often get stuck by sticking to a single leadership style as their products move through vastly different stages. Products and teams benefit from situation leadership, since they need different types of direction and support as they evolve. Failing to adapt can stall growth or even sink projects.

Four Phases of Product Leadership
Anshul describes his leadership framework, which breaks down the product lifecycle into four phases. For each phase, a different leadership style is needed:

Coaching in the MVP Phase
When product leaders move from a discovery phase where directive leadership is required, to the MVP stage where they need a more hands-off coaching approach, they can often struggle with letting go of control, navigating ego, and avoiding becoming the bottleneck as a product moves to new stages. Product leaders should realize they are not losing authority or relevance but are actually expanding their skills and impact on the product, because empowering others multiplies a leader’s impact.

Supporting in the Growth Phase
By the growth phase, it is important that supporting leaders have been prepared to lead their teams. The product leader is no longer in every conversation. They enable the supporting leaders to make good decisions. If supporting leaders aren’t trained, the product development process can slow at this point. Anshul says that the role of the leader isn’t to be the smartest person in the room but to make the whole room smarter.

Delegating in the Mature Phase
At this phase, the team shouldn’t depend on the leader for every decision. The leader should instead spend their time closely following how the market is moving.

“Make decisions when you have about 70% of the information you wish you had.”  – Jeff Bezos

Anshul Garg is a Product Leader, Speaker and Author who transforms complex business challenges into elegant digital product solutions. With 19+ years at industry-leading organizations including Amazon, Capital One, and Nationwide Insurance, he has delivered over $100 million in annual business value through strategic product initiatives. 

With an MBA from Indian Institute of Management, Mumbai, and an engineering degree from National Institute of Technology Jamshedpur, Anshul combines strategic vision with technical depth, specializing in launching AI-driven zero-to-one products, orchestrating large-scale digital transformations, and leading diverse, cross-functional teams. 

Beyond building products, Anshul builds leaders. As PDMA DMV Chapter Head, Advisory Board Member at Products That Count and Brand Ambassador for GIMI, he shares insights on product management, adaptive leadership, and emerging trends. He fosters environments where innovation and personal growth flourish together, building high-performing teams that consistently deliver exceptional outcomes. 

Thank you for taking the journey to product mastery and learning with me from the successes and failures of product innovators, managers, and developers. If you enjoyed the discussion, help out a fellow product manager by sharing it using the social media buttons you see below.

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