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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This episode features the upcoming PDMA Ignite Innovation Summit, a must-attend event for product professionals. I’m talking with conference organizers Spike Ross-Corbett and Bill Reid about this year’s special 50th anniversary conference, the summit’s interactive workshops, keynote speaker, and valuable networking opportunities. Listeners will also hear about the product management and innovation resources offered by PDMA for ongoing professional development.

 In this episode, we’re talking about one of my favorite things — the Product Development and Management Association’s (PDMA) Ignite Innovation Summit. I go to this annual conference because PDMA is the professional association that has taught me more than any other place about how to be a professional product person. PDMA is the professional association for product developers, managers, innovators, and leaders, and they have been researching the product space longer than anyone else.

Today, I’m joined by the PDMA conference organizers. Spike Ross-Corbett is VoC strategist at Unum, where his job is to bridge the gap between customer insight and building products. This is his third year as the PDMA summit chair. Bill Reid is vice president at Boulder Imaging, where he manages the hardware team, project management team, and innovation process. This is his eighth year on the summit committee.

The PDMA Ignite Innovation Summit will be held October 8-9th, 2026, in Atlanta, GA. Find out more at PDMAsummit.com and use code PDMACHAD20 for 20% off your registration.

Inside the PDMA Ignite Innovation Summit
Spike and Bill offer an in-depth preview of the PDMA Ignite Innovation Summit, taking place October 8th-9th in Atlanta, GA. The summit is designed for innovators, product managers, and leaders to learn actionable strategies and frameworks tailored for a cross-functional, cross-industry audience.

Interactive Workshops
This year’s summit features four hands-on workshops:

Pre-Summit Webinars
Pre-summit webinars August 18th and 25th help participants prepare, select workshops, and bring real-world problems to solve. These webinars are available to everyone, not only conference attendees. Check them out at PDMAsummit.com.

Outstanding Corporate Innovator (OCI) Award
The Outstanding Corporate Innovator Award session allows attendees to learn cutting-edge innovation best practices directly from award-winning companies.

Keynote Speaker – Dr. Robert Cooper
The keynote speaker this year is Dr. Robert Cooper, who will discuss the future of innovation and AI in product development.

Celebrating 50 Years of PDMA
This year marks PDMA’s 50th anniversary. The conference will celebrate the last 50 years and look ahead to the next 50 years of product development and innovation. Special events include a panel of past PDMA presidents and a Leaders Roundtable where industry leaders will discuss a playbook of innovation.

PDMA Resources & Community
PDMA offers a wealth of resources for product managers, including classic books, the PDMA Body of Knowledge, the Journal of Product Innovation Management (JPIM), and the K-Hub online knowledge base, available to both members and non-members. Unlike many professional associations, PDMA focuses on a discipline, not a single job title, so it’s open to people working in product management across functions and industries and brings together academics, practitioners, and consultants. One of PDMA’s core pillars is to build the community of innovators and product managers, and the opportunity to make in-person connections at the summit is an essential part of that.

Testimonials about the PDMA Summit
Bill, Spike, and I share some testimonials from attendees of the PDMA Summit:

“ The PDMA Summit is a gathering of passionate professionals who are striving to do the best work they can for their organizations. Learning from those with a variety of experience in a variety of industries helps me learn and solve the problems I’m facing in my role. It’s so valuable.”

“ As a newer member of the PDMA, I found the Innovation Summit to be an eye-opening experience. The abundance of insight presented from leading professionals was worth more than the price of admission.”

“ Connecting with product managers and innovators from various industries opened my eyes to a broader scope of my team’s potential.”

“Stop the Stupid.” – Doug Hall

Spike Ross-Corbett is the Summit Chair and a member of the Board of Directors for the Product Development and Management Association (PDMA), where he leads the vision and execution of the annual Ignite Innovation Summit. Professionally, Spike is a Product Manager at Portland Marketing Analytics (PortMA), managing SaaS platforms that deliver data-driven insights and operational efficiency. Spike holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Economics from the University of Southern Maine. Before his career in product management, he served in the United States Coast Guard, where he oversaw ordnance programs and training initiatives. He currently resides in Maine. 

Bill Reid brings over 35 years of experience in all aspects of product development, from start-ups to global corporations like Ford, GE Aircraft Engines, GM, and Covidien. Since 2007, he has led innovation and consulting efforts through his company, Immersed, and currently serves as Vice President at Boulder Imaging, overseeing hardware engineering, production, supply chain, and professional services. Bill is a certified New Product Development Professional, serves on the PDMA board, and holds degrees in mechanical and aerospace engineering. He is the inventor or co-inventor on 24 U.S. patents and the author of Immersed in the Cave, a self-published book on innovation.  

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 of Product Mastery Now, I’m once again talking with product management legend Bob Cooper about how AI is reshaping product development. Covering recent research and industry trends, we discuss where AI is making an impact, why most AI implementations fail, and what companies can do to successfully integrate AI into product development processes. We also touch on the ongoing importance of customer discovery, organizational change management, and governance as AI tools proliferate.

Every few years, something comes along that people say will change product development forever — anyone remember Extreme Programming? That is only one of many. But, this time, they might be right. AI is now writing code, generating concepts, running analysis, drafting the business case, and writing PRDs — the very work that used to define new product development and management. So what happens to how we build products?

My guest has spent four decades studying what actually drives new product success. He discovered the Stage-Gate process, he’s been called the world’s top innovation management scholar, and this October he’s delivering the keynote at the PDMA annual conference in Atlanta. Today we get a preview of that thinking — how AI is reshaping the way products are conceived, developed, and launched. 

AI Adoption in Product Development
Bob Cooper shares findings from his recent research on corporate AI adoption in product management, which revealed that while interest in AI is high, actual usage is less widespread than expected. Firms are harnessing AI especially in the front end of product development for tasks like market studies, competitive analysis, technical assessments, idea generation, and screening. However, adoption drops in the product design and launch phases, with risk aversion and high costs acting as barriers. After launch, some companies are leveraging AI tools to synthesize customer feedback for future iterations.

Why Most AI Implementations Fail
Despite the hype, failure rates for AI projects are alarmingly high, with some studies reporting 80-95% of AI implementations fail to deliver ROI. Bob unpacks the root causes: Often, IT teams propose that the R&D or product teams use shiny new AI tools, but they don’t actually meet the developers’ needs, so they aren’t implemented. Another limitation on AI specific to product management is faulty data. It’s challenging to use AI to put together data from many sources while ensuring it doesn’t invent any data. Many businesses grossly underestimate the amount of time and energy necessary to get good data. Companies that effectively begin using AI have a clear strategy and goals with committed support from top management.

Necessity of Customer Discovery
Bob has noticed that organizations often fail to do adequate voice-of-process or voice-of-business discovery to figure out how AI could help their business. Likewise, companies, especially in software, may think that voice-of-the-customer research isn’t necessary since they can just build products very quickly and see what customers like. However, VOC research remains essential to avoid wasting time and ensure you’re delivering products customers value.

Governance and Decision-Making in the Age of AI
In portfolio and project governance, most product leaders are reluctant to give up decision-making to machines. Bob encourages the development of tools that not only gather information but help make sense of it.

Bob’s Keynote at the PDMA Ignite Innovation Summit
Bob will be giving the keynote at the Product Development and Management Association’s (PDMA) Ignite Innovation Summit this October. This year celebrates PDMA’s 50th birthday, and Bob has been involved since the beginning. He authored the first article in the first issue of the Journal of Product Innovation Management and discovered Stage Gate, an integration of successful playbooks for the new product process.

“AI and product development — don’t give up.” – Bob Cooper

Dr. Robert G. Cooper is the creator of the world-famous Stage-Gate® process, and was named the “World’s Top Innovation Management Scholar by the prestigious U.S. Journal of Product Innovation Management and winner of the best seminar leader of the year at Sweden’s Chalmers Institute in Goteborg. He is also a Fellow of the Product Development and Management Association (PDMA). He has combined practical consulting with ground-breaking research for many years. Besides his best-selling books “Winning at New Products” and “Portfolio Management for New Products”, he has published more than 130 articles on R&D and innovation management.

Dr. Cooper is Professor Emeritus at McMaster University in Canada and ISBM Distinguished Research Fellow at Pennsylvania State University in the USA. He is also President of the Product Development Institute offering innovation know-how and support around the world. Many companies in North America, Europe and Asia have introduced his methods, including 3M, ABB, BASF, Bosch-Siemens, Carlsberg, Caterpillar, Diageo, Dow Chemical, DuPont, Exxon Chemicals, HP, Honeywell, ITT, L.M. Ericsson, LEGO, Procter & Gamble, and Swarovski.

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 of Product Mastery Now, Ravi Sawhney, designer and founder of RKS Design, joins me to share his 40+ years of insights on designing products customers love. He discusses the origins of Psycho-Aesthetics, a human-centered design methodology, and demonstrates how deep empathy and understanding of customer aspirations lead to emotionally resonant and commercially successful products. The episode is packed with practical examples, including how Ravi’s team used deep empathy to transformatively redesign the MiniMed insulin pump.

Our guest today, Ravi Sawhney, has spent more than forty years designing products you’d recognize – from Teddy Ruxpin, the first animated talking bear, to RKS electric guitars, which won several design awards and were played by Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, and other artists, to a medical device that changed how an entire category of patients felt about themselves. He started his career at Xerox PARC, working on one of the very first touchscreen interfaces, when it was bleeding-edge technology. Along the way, he developed a methodology, Psycho-Aesthetics, that Harvard now teaches – a systematic way to design products people genuinely love, which is our goal as product professionals. Today, he’s still the founder and CEO of RKS Design, the design and innovation firm he started back in 1980, where he continues to help companies create products that connect powerfully with customers. In this episode, you’ll learn about creating such products that customers love. 

Human Behavior Informs Product Design
At Xerox, Ravi worked on one of the first touchscreens. As he watched customers interact with this new technology and worked with human-centered psychologists, he realized that product design is fundamentally about human motivation and behavior, not just functionality.

Great Products Create Emotional Connection
Ravi discusses why a purely functional product often fails to capture customer loyalty. He explains that products must provide emotional empowerment and self-actualization to create memorable experiences and lasting customer bonds.

What is Psycho-Aesthetics?
Ravi developed Psycho-Aesthetics, a systematic, repeatable methodology enabling innovators to adopt their customers’ perspectives and identify white space opportunities for product development, which are areas of unmet needs. This methodology goes beyond Design Thinking and is structured to be accessible to both product teams and students. Ravi’s group recently released an AI tool called PA-AI to help innovators apply Psycho-Aesthetics. Designed to be scalable and accessible (especially for students), the tool aims to reduce product failure rates by focusing on unmet customer needs.

Using Personas with Psycho-Aesthetics
Ravi uses personas to understand customers’ needs. His teams use ethnography to understand a market segment’s key attractors and then write a “help me” statement about the problem they need solved. This process helps product teams understand current needs and anticipate future aspirations, giving them a forward-looking edge.

Using Human-Centered Thinking to Redesign the Insulin Pump
Ravi tells the story of how he and the RKS team redesigned the MiniMed 507 insulin pump. Ravi and others on the design team lived out the experience of diabetic patients firsthand. They used insulin pumps that pumped saline and experienced the social stigma of using these medical devices in public. They realized that patients were choosing not to use the MiniMed insulin pump, although it could improve their length and quality of life, because of the stigma attached to being perceived as ill. The design team modified the device to look like a high-end pager, so patients could use it discretely. Removing the emotional barrier led to dramatic sales growth and improved quality of life for users.

Predict the Future and Think Globally
Ravi advises product managers to study their customers well enough to know not only what they say they need now but what they will need in the future. He also recommends that product managers think globally and have empathy for customers whose lives are very different from their own.

 “It’s not how you feel about the design or experience. It’s how it makes you feel about yourself.” – Ravi Sawhney

Ravi Sawhney has spent more than forty years at the forefront of product and technology innovation. He is a serial entrepreneur, business leader, author, lecturer, and thought leader on design and innovation. He is founder and CEO of RKS Design, a forty-year-old design and innovation firm that has developed solutions for clients in diverse industries, incubated companies, created licensed products, assembled a high-caliber team of colleagues, and accumulated accolades from the media and design juries.

Sawhney is also the inventor of the Psycho-Aesthetics® design methodology, which Harvard Business Press has explored as a business school case study. Psycho-Aesthetics® is the central focus of Predictable Magic, a book co-authored by Sawhney and published by Wharton School Publishing in 2010.

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 of Product Mastery Now, executive voice coach Jimmy Cannon joins me to explore why even the most prepared professionals can lose their voice under pressure, and, most importantly, how to regain command in those key presentation moments. Drawing on decades of stage experience and the latest research in voice science, Jimmy Cannon shares actionable tools for breathing, calming nerves, and connecting authentically with an audience, whether you’re leading a team meeting or presenting to your CEO.

My guest today spent decades on stage as a professional musician — playing saxophone and singing alongside artists like Tom Jones and Roger Taylor of Queen — before reinventing himself as an executive voice coach. Today he helps leaders sound as capable as they actually are, especially in those difficult, pressure-filled moments. If you’ve ever walked into a big presentation fully prepared and then watched your own voice tighten up and betray you, this conversation is for you. In this episode, you’ll learn why your voice fails you under pressure, such as when defending a roadmap, and what to do for your voice to be reliable and to sound like an executive. 

Why Your Voice Fails You
Jimmy explains that although it is important to prepare for a presentation, preparing content will not help you in the moment if your body freezes and your mind goes blank. Often, during public speaking, people experience a physiological response, in which their sympathetic nervous system causes throat tightening and other symptoms. To combat this, Jimmy recommends a method to activate the parasympathetic nervous system.

One Idea, One Breath
Jimmy explains his core technique, One Idea, One Breath. Breath causes the voice to resonate. Jimmy recommends elongating the out-breath, activating your vagus nerve and parasympathetic nervous system, causing your heart rate to lower and calming you. Elongate your phrasing and vowels and use all your breath. Many people take shallow breaths in their chest, but it is more calming to take deep breaths from your diaphragm.

Jimmy demonstrates vocal exercises like straw phonation and elongating vowels, to build muscle memory and regulate the nervous system. Many people speak in short phrases. Jimmy recommends preparing what you want to say, and then saying one idea with one controlled, elongated breath.

Building Audience Connection
Break the fourth wall, such as by asking the audience a question, helps put both the audience and the speaker at ease. Jimmy recommends focusing on the intention of your words, to connect with the audience.

Mindfulness for In-the-Moment Confidence
Mindfulness techniques, which Jimmy learned as part of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, can help anchor you in the present when negative thoughts arise. Jimmy walks through a simple exercise: Notice five things you can see, five things you can hear, and five things you can feel. While doing this, concentrate on deep, long breaths. This exercise can bring you into the present and diffuse negative thoughts.

“If in doubt, breathe out.” – Ron Morris and Linda Hutchison

Jimmy Cannon is an Executive Voice and Communication Coach and ACT Practitioner. He helps leaders speak with confidence, clarity, and calm authority by aligning their voice, body, and presence so the message lands every time. His work focuses on leadership communication, confident speaking, and public speaking under pressure.

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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For our 600th episode, we are re-running an episode with a legend in product management, Dr. Robert Cooper, who has made many foundational contributions to product management and innovation. He is the keynote speaker at the next PDMA annual conference, Oct 8-9 in Atlanta, GA – details at www.pdmasummit.com.

Dr. Robert Cooper discovered the now famous Stage-Gate process and was named the “World’s Top Innovation Management Scholar” by the prestigious Journal of Product Innovation Management. Besides his best-selling books Winning at New Products and Portfolio Management for New Products, he has published more than 130 articles on R&D and innovation management. He is frequently helping organizations succeed while also holding the role of Professor Emeritus at McMaster University and Distinguished Research Fellow at Penn State University.

We’re facing new uncertainty and risks. Companies have to think about what to do short-term to keep the lights on and what to do long-term for bolder innovations. Some companies will retreat and cut their spending by cutting bolder long-term innovations, and we saw in the recession around 2010 that was a bad strategy.

In some mature industries, it is increasingly difficult to find opportunities for new products. In the 1920s and 1930s, there was no absence of problems in telecommunications. They couldn’t even send a long-distance call because there were no amplifiers, no vacuum tubes, and no transistors. They had to invent all those things. When you have no absence of customer or user problems, if you’re reasonably intelligent, you can usually come up with the inventions and the necessary breakthrough new products. Today it’s harder in the telecommunications business because there are problems but not as evident as formerly. Other industries like IT are still going strong with many opportunities and problems to solve, but it’s becoming increasingly tougher to find fantastic voids in the marketplace.

Another challenge is fortitude of the general manager to keep spending at the same level when it is tougher and tougher to get the return on investment you need.

On the other hand, there are all kinds of new technologies like AI, biosciences, and new opportunities in the medical field. These technological possibilities should generate all kinds of new product opportunities.

There are many risks and uncertainties like the supply chain, market size, and expected profitability. The numbers we put in our business cases are notoriously wrong often by a factor of two. Many business cases are fantasy because there are so many unknowns, which people usually don’t factor in. Take a hard look at how you do your business case in light of increasing uncertainties and build that in somehow.

I have a new article coming out on expected commercial value, which builds likelihoods into the business case. How do you estimate likelihoods? We didn’t know how to do it in the past, but now we have estimates from companies like Dow Chemical and 3M. They have put together probability tables that give the likelihood of success under certain circumstances, because they’ve studied enough projects to know. Do the net present value calculations with correction factors for likelihood of success.

The other piece of advice is getting the product right. Sometimes people do voice-of-customer analysis and think they understand the customer’s needs, then spend a year designing a prototype, then do field trials and everything goes wrong. The customer’s needs have changed or the customers didn’t understand their own needs.

Instead, we recommend iterative innovation. Build something really fast and demo it to the customer to get instant feedback. Get the product out in their face fast, early, often, and cheap. The first version doesn’t have to be the real product. You can create a computer simulation or animation. Show the customer something in the first three weeks of development and repeat every four weeks. Demo to management too because you need their buy-in and support.

Steve Jobs said, “Customers don’t know what they want until they see it.” LEGO has a B2B business called LEGO Education, which sells learning products to schools and teachers. It’s a combination of IT software and LEGO blocks. There was a new product coming out that LEGO had been working on for about four years and couldn’t get right. It was a creative writing curriculum to teach younger children how to be more creative writers. LEGO had several panels of teachers, and they asked them, “What are you looking for in this product?” And the teachers weren’t sure. One of the teachers finally said, “Why don’t you build something and show it to us? And then we’ll tell you if it’s right.” The team got into iterative development or Agile Stage Gate, and it worked very well.

One of the major challenges is having too many projects in the pipeline for available resources. Nobody has the fortitude to say no, so the default option is to do them all. By doing them all, we guarantee they’re all late. When you do a portfolio review and re-rank all the projects, you find out that a few of them that look shiny and bright at the beginning are not quite so shiny and bright over time. Maybe it is time for a tough re-review of the entire set of projects to kill some of them to benefit the whole portfolio.

You can rank the projects from 1 to 15, lop off the bottom 5, and reallocate the resources to the top 10, but who has the guts to do that? You’re going to be annoying or discouraging somebody. But let’s face it, some projects are the bottom third and maybe their resources are better spend on the the top two thirds.

You have to have buckets and rank each bucket separately because you can’t compare minor modifications and bold innovations. Someone has to have the method and the guts to do this re-ranking and get top management on board. Those meetings are pretty tough, especially the first one, but it has got to be done. Otherwise your projects are going to be late or under-resourced, and success rates will go down.

Use a good method for ranking projects. Have a tough portfolio manager. Have a good data system.

Often, when projects go through gates or portfolio review, the only criteria for go are “Is it on schedule?” and “Is it on budget?” Those are the the wrong questions. They’re backward-looking questions. Instead, ask forward-looking questions like, “Does this project still offer great value to the company?” and “What’s the financial value going forward?” Net present value and productivity index are good metrics for that.

The first key step is knowing where your money and resources are going now. Make a pie chart of the breakdown across the buckets by numbers of projects, a second pie chart of where the resources are going, and a third pie chart of first-year sales for new projects. Often, you might find that where the sales are coming from is not where the resources are going. You might be putting most of your seed on the worst fields.

The Stage-Gate process came from stories of successful entrepreneurs and teams. These projects had bold and assertive project leaders and teams that did everything right and had huge successes. Today companies have lost that entrepreneurial risk-taking approach. They’ve burdened their Stage-Gate process with too much paperwork and check-the-box exercises.

Get rid of non-value-added work. Apply Lean principles. Map out your process beginning-to-end on a big roll of paper or post-it-notes. Get rid of all the unnecessary stuff. It only takes about a day to do that exercise and then a little longer to improve the process. Before you get into Agile, get your process working right.

“There are two ways to win at new products. The first way is ‘doing projects right’—and that’s what Stage-Gate is all about—a stage-by-stage process to drive new products to market effectively. The second way is ‘doing the right projects’—and that’s about project selection, making the right investment decisions, and portfolio management. The problem here is that management’s batting average is worse than the toss of a coin—only 25% percent of projects approved for development become commercial successes! Let’s see how to do both ways to win better.” – Bob Cooper

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 of Product Mastery Now, three-time returning guest Nir Eyal discusses his latest book, Beyond Belief. The conversation dives into how our underlying beliefs shape our actions, careers, and the products we build, with science-backed strategies for challenging limiting beliefs, reframing workplace motivation, and building liberating beliefs that help teams thrive.

There are guests you have on once. And there are guests you keep coming back to because as the field keeps moving so do they.

Nir Eyal keeps moving, learning, and informing us on how to make better products and how to be better ourselves. Twelve years ago he joined me on episode 30 to talk about Hooked —  how great products are built on human behavior, not just features. He came back on episode 259 for Indistractable — how we take our attention back in a device-filled world. 

Now he’s gone deeper. His new book is Beyond Belief — a science-backed look at the hidden assumptions that decide what we think is possible and how our psychology impacts what we can accomplish. And for product managers and leaders, the beliefs we carry about our work, our teams, and ourselves shape everything we accomplish, including the products we ship.

Nir’s New Book, Beyond Belief
Nir’s newest book, Beyond Belief, was inspired by conversations with people who had read his previous book, Indistractable, and complained that it didn’t work for them, despite not having actually tried any of the practices the book recommended. Nir wondered why, in an age when we know so much, we often fail to put information into action.

What Are Beliefs?
Nir distinguishes between facts, faith, and beliefs. He defines facts as objective truths, faith as convictions that do not require evidence, and beliefs as convictions that are open to revision based on evidence. Beliefs are malleable. Nir explains that many problems come from not realizing that many of the things we think are facts are actually beliefs. In order to change our behavior, we should ask ourselves, “Is this belief serving me or hurting me?”

Beliefs change what we see. If you don’t believe something is possible, you won’t stay motivated to do it. Long-term motivation requires a behavior, a benefit, and belief. You must believe that you are capable of performing the behavior and that by doing so you will receive the benefit.

The Three Powers of Belief
Nir introduces three powers of belief.

Together, these powers of belief determine who we become.

Preparing for the Pain
Nir critiques “manifesting,” which focuses on outcomes. Research shows that envisioning outcomes makes people less likely to achieve those outcomes. A more effective practice is focusing on the process needed to achieve those outcomes. This is how athletes prepare for an event — they visualize what they are going to do and how they are going to react when something goes wrong. Nir recommends that in a business context, leaders should help their teams “prepare for the pain” rather than fixating on the ends. When we believe the pain can serve a purpose, it does not become suffering. Top performers feel the same pain as everyone else, but they believe it serves a purpose, and can therefore sustain motivation over the long term instead of quitting.

Reframing Negative Beliefs
Nir recommends a technique called the turnaround to help product leaders turn limiting beliefs into liberating beliefs. When you’re experience pain, such as being stuck in your career, instead of focusing on your suffering, ask yourself, “What is the benefit here?” Maybe you have more time to spend with family or extra time to look for another job during a time of rapid change. These reframed beliefs increase motivation and decrease suffering. Nir recommends collecting a portfolio of perspectives to ask yourself, “Could the opposite of what’s causing your suffering also be true?”

Beliefs can be useful even if untrue. For example, Amazon uses the belief, “It’s always day one.” This isn’t true, but it is useful. Liberating beliefs don’t have to be true but they can be aspirational and are open to change based on the evidence.

Useful Beliefs for Product Teams
Nir describes how product leaders can help their teams adopt useful beliefs. Leaders should have beliefs that they are willing to sacrifice for, that the team will stake their reputation on no matter what. This beliefs should be specific and fitting to the organization.

“Beliefs are tools, not truths.” – Nir Eyal

Nir Eyal is a globally recognized authority on behavior change and human potential. His frameworks have empowered millions to build better habits, enhance focus, and unlock greater agency in their lives and work. A former lecturer at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford, Nir has collaborated with leaders and organizations worldwide to boost performance through behavior design. 

He is the New York Times bestselling author of the international bestsellers Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products and Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life, which have sold over one million copies in more than 30 languages. Hooked was a finalist for the 2014 Goodreads Choice Awards. Indistractable won the 2019 Outstanding Works of Literature (OWL) Award and was named one of the Best Business & Leadership Books of the Year by Amazon, Audible, and The Globe and Mail. His third book, Beyond Belief: The Science-Backed Way to Stop Limiting Yourself and Achieve Breakthrough Results, became an instant New York Times best-seller and reveals how to identify and replace the hidden beliefs that define our limits. 

As a seasoned entrepreneur and angel investor, Nir has backed multi-billion-dollar companies, including Canva, Kahoot!, and others. In addition to blogging at NirAndFar.com, his writing has been featured in The New York Times, Harvard Business Review, The Atlantic, and Psychology Today. For over 25 years, he has worked alongside his wife and business partner, Julie Li. 

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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