Vitaly Friedman is an author, the UX Lead with the European Parliament, and editor-in-chief of Smashing Magazine. On June 25, he will facilitate a workshop at ITX’s 2-day Product + Design Conference. In this episode of Product Momentum, Vitaly joins Sean and Dan to share his insights about tackling the unique challenges of UX design in enterprise-level environments.

Tune in to hear the following:

It’s OK to be a disruptor of legacy systems in enterprise organizations

“Legacy is like that ‘magical box’ that we’re afraid to touch,” Vitaly says. “No one really knows how it works, and the people who set it up decades ago are now gone and left with no proper documentation.”

But it’s OK to be a disruptor of legacy systems and the political hierarchies that created them as long as you show the value you can bring and approach your task with a risk management mindset. “Start with smaller projects; ask users and stakeholders to review your unfinished work; and always remember that your ‘disruption’ affects a lot of people who need that tool quite literally to do their work.”

Start small, build trust, and focus your vocabulary on the language of your stakeholders.

As part of your research, ask stakeholders to show you their product and to walk you through it. Listen carefully to the words they use to describe it – and how frequently those same words are used.

Says Vitaly: “You can get a better understanding of what’s important just by listening to how they talk about it and how much the features or workflows or ways of working mean to them as well.”

For humans, with humans, by humans.

Designing software is a people business, so Vitaly encourages UX professionals to “observe the relationships between stakeholders” so that you can learn about the people inside the organization who believe in and want to support UX initiatives. “There’s a good chance some UX projects benefited them and helped them be successful,” Vitaly adds.

When you find the people who deeply believe in UX, tell them the story about the project you’re working on. “Once you make them aware, they will move mountains for you and support your efforts,” he says.

Product + Design Workshop: How can UX designers welcome AI into their environment?

In his workshop at the ITX Product + Design Conference, Vitaly will introduce to attendees some of his recent experimental work.

“We designers expect a lot from AI, and we believe there’s a lot of things AI can do to help us build great products,” Vitaly says. “But the reality is that AI is really weird. We’re accustomed to software being rather predictable and reliable: if you click on a button, you get the result you’re expecting. But sometimes – like 10-15% of the time – AI can be unreliable.”

In the workshop, Vitaly will discuss “those little things” that are important to us designers – and make them better with assistance from AI.

ITX’s Product + Design Conference returns to Rochester, June 25-26. Check out the complete list of workshop facilitators and keynote speakers on our P+D Conference landing page!

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Christian Marek is Vice President of Product Management at Productboard. He has applied his years of experience in technology and finance while leading product management efforts at Facebook, Google, and Docusign. In this episode, Christian joins co-hosts Sean Murray and Dan Sharp to explore how AI tools are revolutionizing product management by enhancing customer obsession and meeting user needs effectively. Here’s what we cover:

What does it mean to be “customer obsessed”?

And how do I know if I am? Customer obsession is more important than ever before, Christian says. He shares three critical questions to help you determine whether your organization can call itself, “customer obsessed.”

How AI supports Product Managers

Many PMs see AI as a tool that drives efficiency, helps teams go faster, and reduces waste. And it does. But when properly integrated into your workflows, AI tools also enhance decision-making by streamlining your team’s collection of customer insights. Product managers can leverage AI to quickly analyze customer interactions and feedback, allowing them to identify key problems and prioritize features based on data-driven insights.

Next-level Product Management

The role of product managers is evolving with AI, enabling them to focus more on strategy and vision rather than just feature specifications. “PMs who embrace AI,” Christian says, :will be able to scale themselves significantly and to think more about their organization’s vision, business strategy, and high-level execution.” Product managers are quickly adapting to this growing level of influence and enhancing their contribution to team and organizational success.

Obstacles to AI Adoption

Companies often face hurdles in adopting AI – sometimes due to internal resistance and the need for cultural shifts regarding data sharing and privacy. Ask yourself: is my company, and my company’s data, prepared to take advantage of AI’s capabilities?

ITX’s Product + Design Conference returns to Rochester, June 25-26. Be sure to check out the complete list of workshop facilitators and keynote speakers on our P+D Conference landing page!

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Cassidy Fein is currently leading growth for Autopatch within Windows Servicing and Delivery at Microsoft. Based in NYC, she has over 10 years of experience driving product innovation, scaling teams, and delivering customer-centric solutions. Throughout her career, she’s demonstrated a passion for empowering the next generation of product leaders, especially through her teaching with Mind the Product.

In this episode, Cassidy sits down with Product Momentum co-hosts Sean Murray and Dan Sharp to take a closer look at product strategy – and its execution. Using Nvidia as an example, Cassidy describes how the chip maker applied three core tenets of strategy, as outlined by Richard Rumelt in his book, Good Strategy, Bad Strategy, to become one of the world’s most valuable companies. They are:

First, declare your hypothesis that gets at the root cause of the problem. Next, apply a guiding policy – your overall approach to solving it. Finally, execute a coherent action that not only makes sense to your team, but also aligns with everything your team is driving toward.

Here’s what else you’ll learn from Cassidy:

What Good Strategy Looks Like

Cassidy explores the characteristics of good and bad strategy, and explains how knowing the difference can empower teams. There’re a couple ways to look at this, she says.

“First, a good strategy should be easy to understand,” Cassidy adds. “You shouldn’t have to have a deep, complex understanding of your space and the technology within it to be able to explain it to someone else. A good strategy is also actionable; it includes all the things you and your team are doing to ladder up to fulfill that strategy.”

Creating a Local Strategy

When the overarching company strategy is unclear, teams should work to create their own local strategy.

“I try to empower folks to understand how, by creating a local strategy, they can make their teams understand what it is that they’re trying to accomplish. As long as you’re able to protect your local area, protect your space, and make sure that that it’s cogent,” Cassidy explains, “you’re likely to have better success.” 

The Consultant’s Mindset

When product managers adopt a consultative mindset – i.e., understanding their market, competition, and how their products generate revenue – it helps in making strategic decisions that align with business objectives.

“Thinking like a consultant, especially for product managers in a junior position, means being up to date on the competitive analysis of similar products in the market, of your pricing and packaging, and how your sales team is incentivized.”

Usability vs. Business Value

Cassidy addresses the tension between usability and business needs, making clear it’s not an either-or question. A successful product, she says, should meet customer needs while also driving revenue for the business.

“The question of which is more important is a bit of a fallacy,” Cassidy explains. “I don’t think we get to choose between the two. If we’re going after a successful product, we need to find the right balance between the two.”

Continuous Learning and Improvement

Our conversation concludes with Cassidy’s recommendation for resources that product managers can utilize that will enhance their strategic thinking and storytelling skills.

ITX’s Product + Design Conference returns to Rochester, June 25-26. Be sure to stay up to date with all the latest updates on Keynote Day agenda and speakers. Learn more here!

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Sarah Doody, CEO of Career Strategy Lab, sat down with Product Momentum co-hosts Sean Murray and Dan Sharp to offer advice to UX designers out there who are frustrated by the volatility in today’s job market. Treat your career like a product you’re designing, Sarah says, and focus on the essential skills you need in a turbulent job market. This is what you’ll learn:

Job Searchers.

Think of your career as a Product. Sarah offers 3 pro tips:

• Think about how you’re designing your career? Marketing your career? Selling your career? Cut out the noise. Maintain a balance between collecting information and acting on it.

Hiring managers.

Product managers.

ITX’s Product + Design Conference returns to Rochester, June 25-26. Our first 3 keynote speakers have been announced! Learn more here!

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In this episode, AgilityInsights’ Trisha Hall joins Paul Gebel for a first-ever joint podcast for Product Momentum — here, with Trisha’s Illuminating Insights. Trisha leads the enterprise solutions and government contracting team at AgilityInsights, and Paul is a VP of Delivery at ITX as well as long-time host of Product Momentum. In this inspiring conversation between friends and colleagues, Paul and Trisha explore the deep connection between organizational agility and the delivery of business value. They also discuss the role AI can play to generate user insights that help product teams convert strategy to desired outcomes.
 
AgilityInsights’ Rebrand + Platform Evolution
As Trisha explains, AgilityInsights (formerly known as AgilityHealth) recently went through a rebrand that included an extensive evolution of their platform and managed services AgilityInsights is better positioned to help business leaders gain insights into the value their teams are delivering. “We can’t continue to create these spinning tornadoes of work inside of our information technology organizations,” Trisha adds. “We’re focused on how we can use the data we gather to deliver value to our client organizations.”
 
Not surprisingly, AI has found a role to play here.
 
Leveraging Data to Facilitate Conversation
Armed with more than 12 million data points in their team health radar alone, AgilityInsights is working with AI tools – embedded directly into their platform – harvesting this customer feedback to help business leaders understand where they need to lean in and which obstacles need to be removed so that their teams can continue to excel.
 
Importantly, a human remains in the decisionmaking loop. “It’s really about having that conversation with leaders about what is most valuable – not whose project is most important. Those are two very different things.”

ITX’s Product + Design Conference returns to Rochester, June 25-26. Interested in learning who will be keynoting? Find out here!

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Tami Reiss, also known as The Product Leader Coach, brings together the strategy, process, and mindset tools we need to perform our roles as product leaders with the ability to think and communicate like an executive. A coach is able to see the whole field, and they’re watching us, their player, from an outsider’s perspective. “Beyond that,” Tami says, “a coach is a great sounding board; the higher we go in our careers, the less we can turn to our bosses for advice. They’ve either never done our specific job, or we don’t want them to think we don’t know how to do it.” A coach can also help product leaders avoid these critical mistakes:

Lacking a Clear Vision.

“One of the biggest mistakes made by product leaders is failing to ensure there is a clearly defined vision,” Tami explains. Vision – that “story of the future” we’re trying to create in the world – helps people internalize what the world will look like because of the things we are building.”

Insufficient Understanding of Finance.

“The biggest jump product leaders have to make is understanding how to translate customer value into business value,” Tami says. Product leaders who lack financial acumen may face challenges in managing budgets, justifying investments, and driving profitable growth.

Overlooking Inorganic Growth.

“Product people spend their entire careers finding problems, building solutions, and launching products that solve those problems,” Tami offers. But they overlook the fact that sometimes you’re not going to be the person to build the solution.” Inorganic growth means you might have to find a partner; you might have to acquire the solution; or you might be acquired. Inorganic growth is about business growth, Tami concludes. It’s not about  product growth.

Prefer the video experience? Check out the Product Momentum YouTube channel to catch our conversation with Tami Reiss and all our recent guests!

Save the date! ITX’s Product + Design Conference returns to Rochester, June 25-26. Find out more!

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Katie Dove is an applied behavioral scientist and managing director of Irrational Labs, a  product design and behavior change lab. She and her team help companies like Airbnb, Microsoft, and Uber answer the question, Why do our customers behave like they do? and then help them design creative solutions that work. We caught up with Katie for an in-person chat at INDUSTRY; in our conversation, we discussed:

Human Value in Products.

Katie unpacked the notion of amplifying user value – human value, to be more precise – stressing the importance of understanding user behavior and needs, rather than just focusing on economic value.

“When I talk about human value,” Katie explains, “I’m actually talking about what’s created for the user in the moment of using a product or an experience online. And so I contrast this a little bit with economic value. When you do that in product,” she adds, “people will come back more, they’ll be more loyal, and they’ll increase their engagement.”

The Power of Feeling Known.

It’s crucial for users to feel recognized and known by product builders. In fact, during her talk, Katie pointed to research that says it’s more important that the consumer feels known than it is for the consumer to know us. As product leaders, we can boost our users’ sense of feeling known through personalized experiences and interactions that build trust, loyalty, and engagement.

Companies like Duolingo are successful because “one of the very first things they do is get to know you,” Katies adds. They go from knowing nothing about their user to knowing a lot by guiding them  through their onboarding quiz, which asks about the user’s preferences and increases their expectation that things will be tailored to their needs.”

Balancing Personalization and Privacy.

How do we balance our desire to personalize offerings with our users’ desire for privacy? One way, Katie explains, is by being transparent about data usage and actually asking users questions to ensure they feel comfortable with how their data is being used.

“By asking questions, you’re doing two things,” Katie says. “You’re giving people the opportunity to have some agency in the process, and you’re making it explicit what you’re collecting and why.”

Katie also points to Irrational Labs’ Three B model of behavior change. It involves

Be sure to catch the entire episode to learn more from Katie Dove about using behavioral science and psychology to help your team drive user value.

Save the date! ITX’s Product + Design Conference returns to Rochester, June 25-26. Find out more!

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Bruce McCarthy is a renowned product leader at Product Culture, the organization he founded in 2018. He’s also the author of two books: Aligned (2024) and Product Roadmaps Relaunched (2018). Bruce sat down with the Product Momentum team for an in-person chat on the heels of his INDUSTRY Global keynote; our conversation focused on –

The bottom line is this: stakeholders are not just peripheral figures in the product development ecosystem, but are central customers whose needs must be meticulously considered in the product manager’s decision-making process.
 
Stakeholders as Customers
One of the refreshing perspectives Bruce brought to the conversation was the idea of viewing stakeholders as customers. As he explained, “A stakeholder is anybody in your organization whose help and support you need in order for your product…to be successful. [I]t has to be marketed and sold and supported. It has to be financed.”
 
Think of stakeholders as your extended team who have a stake in the success of your product. In that respect, he adds, “Stakeholders are actually your customers too.”
 
The Toughest Job in Product: Prioritizing Stakeholder Needs
Product managers learn quickly that they can’t balance stakeholder needs perfectly, ever. “It’s always an art,” Bruce explains. “It’s always a work in progress. It’s always saying ‘no’ to some things in order to say ‘yes’ to other things.”
 
And that’s why it’s the hardest job in Product. The success of your product hinges on the identification and prioritization of competing stakeholder incentives. To be successful, product managers need to recognize the diversity of interests and influences that various stakeholders bring to the table.
 
The Stakeholder Canvas
Using the company org chart is one way to help prioritize stakeholder needs, but sometimes (often?), Bruce explains, it can be misleading. It doesn’t always indicate who has the decisionmaker’s ear. You might think it’s the CEO or Head of Product…only to find out for this project, it’s actually the CFO or the Head of Engineering. “The question then becomes, ‘what do you use instead?’”
 
As Bruce explains, “We developed the stakeholder canvas to help you map out your stakeholders, make a list of who they are, and capture all the information that you have about them: what they care about and what they need from you – which is just as important as what you need from them.”
“The stakeholder canvas helps you bring clarity to stakeholder alignment and make prioritization more manageable,” Bruce concluded.

Be sure to catch the whole conversation with Bruce McCarthy to learn about all the other tools he applied to this challenge, including the DiSC® framework and the DACI and RACI decisionmaking tools.

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There was a time not long ago when a handful of Product Momentum guests (Rich Mironov and Marty Cagan to name just two) lamented the absence of any formalized university program dedicated solely to product managers. Lament no more, thanks to Brad Eiben and his colleagues at Carnegie Mellon University, where Brad is Executive Director of the Master of Science Program in Product Management. Launched in 2018, the program is a one-year experience that blends coursework in leadership and business strategy with such technical practices as UX design, development, and Agile methodology.

Our conversation with Brad actually began the night before we hit ‘record,’ following an action-packed day of conference keynotes at INDUSTRY Global back in September. In this episode, Sean and Sean reconnect with Brad as he explains how he applied the same product management principles he learned as a mechanical engineer at Toyota to his current role in Education.

“There are a lot of business degrees, and a lot of tech degrees,” Brad offers. “But none really bring that third element, which is the design thinking and practical application. So that’s what we strive to create – a truly hands-on program. I always describe the program itself as being a training program, not an academic program.”

In its own way, the program treats education as a proof of concept. Just as it is in real life, product management is a team sport, Brad says.

“In its ideal form, product management is a journey,” Brad says. “A student here is not a lone wolf; they’re part of the pack. When they approach product management correctly – working as collaborators, not as adversaries – and combine their skills to support one another, the effect is ten times more powerful.”

Be sure to catch the entire episode with Brad, where he explains why “the program is my product” — a marketplace in which the university is creating value for students, credentializing their work, and boosting their careers. And no doubt accelerating the maturation of product management as a profession.

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Dan Chuparkoff is a seasoned innovation leader with experience at Google, Atlassian, and McKinsey. The Product Momentum team caught up with him right after his keynote at INDUSTRY Global and talked about how product teams can get beyond the theoretical hype of AI and start zooming in on its immediate potential.

His message was clear: while AI has the capacity to deliver transformative possibilities, product teams need to balance their long-term ambition for AI with a dose of everyday practicality.

“It’s easy to think about the future-forward-looking thing when you talk about something new, like AI,” Dan says. “Maybe AGI [artificial general intelligence] works at some point in the future. Maybe it’s super helpful. But it’s not useful right now.”

Separating Hype from Practical Application

How do we separate the hype from the real-world application? Dan urges teams to embrace useful AI tools now rather than waiting for theoretical advances like artificial general intelligence (AGI).

You can’t go back to your office and use AGI to solve real problems, he adds, “but you can get hands-on now by using notetaking AI tools or translation AI tools to help overcome some everyday challenges. So here’s what I suggest: Create two buckets, one for what you can use next week and one for what might come years down the line.”

As an Umbrella Term, AI Has Leaks

One of Dan’s key points is that we should stop lumping everything under the AI umbrella. When we do that, he explains, we’re actually doing AI a disservice, obscuring its specific, actionable uses.

“Sometimes AI means machine learning from like 28 years ago, and sometimes it means a chatbot on your website. If you’re talking about machine learning a chatbot on your website, say that.” We all want to say we’re working with AI, “but that sort of hyperbole, that umbrella term, is going to confuse folks.” So, be as specific as you can as quickly as you can, he adds.

Think of AI As a Tool for ‘Accelerating Collaboration’

Dan pointed to studies showing that knowledge workers spend 68% of their time sharing information – not producing anything, but sharing it. 68%. So if we want AI tools to drive productivity, quality, and efficiency, they may be best suited (for now, at least) to reduce this resource commitment.

“If you make that even 1% better,” he said, “it’s like hiring four more people for your team.” When we automate product management-related tasks like analyzing customer feedback or summarizing meetings, our teams can focus on higher-value work. In other words, focus on the premium that your teams can offer when they’re freed from the burden of busy work that drives little value – and that AI can easily handle. “The real efficiency will come from people collaborating faster.”

If you prefer the video podcast experience, you can catch our conversation with Dan Chuparkoff on the Product Momentum YouTube channel!

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