Imagine you have over 300,000 customers who love your product. Then, in the span of one weekend in March 2020, you suddenly find yourself with no product to deliver them. Where do you go from there? You go back to the basics, says James Mayes, who joined Sean and Paul in this episode of the Product Momentum Podcast.

As co-founder and CEO of Mind The Product, the global flagship product management conference, James Mayes went from having a business model he thought was the product, to the brutal reminder that the market is in control.

“The pandemic, and the lockdown that followed, made our core product unviable,” he adds. “When your environment changes at that magnitude, you can’t prepare for that. So this was a reminder of something we already knew: You cannot be prepared for every eventuality and every change that will occur.”

In a world full of uncertainty, James contends, you go back to what you know. “So we said, ‘we’re product managers, right? We’re designed to live in uncertainty. It’s part of our DNA.’ So we did just that; we went back to the basic fundamentals of product management.”

Turns out, the same lessons MTP applied to navigate the pandemic will help your team in times of ambiguity. Catch the entire fast-paced conversation with James, and learn how the steps MTP applied can work for your team too –

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Service design is not new; in fact, today’s guests Adam Lawrence and Marc Stickdorn have been writing and teaching service design for more than a decade. But even in that time, the question of its precise definition remains, as Adam points out, “very active.”

It “is really the design process around any service that is the route or the basis for any experience,” Marc offers. It looks at both the customer experience and what an organization needs to do to actually achieve the customer’s desired outcomes.

Adam’s definition is more succinct, but no less thoughtful: “Service design is what service designers do,” he says. That sounds trite on its face, Adam admits, but there’s a good deal of thought behind it. Citing friend and colleague in the field Mauricio Manhaes, Adam adds, “We should spend less time defining service design and more time exposing people to it. Because often you don’t get it until you’ve actually tried it.”

So in their work – including delivering a pair of workshops and keynote addresses at ITX’s Product + Design Conference 2022 – Adam Lawrence and Marc Stickdorn are exposing audiences to service design thinking, methods, and tools “so they understand it in their gut before they understand it in their heads,” Adam says.

Tune in to catch Paul’s entire conversation with Marc and Adam, as they –

The ITX Product + Design Conference 2022 is coming to Rochester, NY on June 23-24; get your tickets here.

The post 87 / Service Design: Methods & Tools that Improve the User Experience appeared first on ITX Corp..

A staggering 70-90% of digital products fail or underperform, says Jonathon Hensley, Co-Founder and CEO of Emerge. That translates to trillions of dollars in unrealized investment. In this episode of the Product Momentum Podcast, Jonathon points to misalignment as the most common source of product or project failure.

“Most products underperform not because the team didn’t care,” Jonathon explains. “I think what’s really happening is that there are barriers to success that are not that well understood.”

Those barriers manifest in a number of ways, he adds, such as sacrificing essential design components to save money in the short term, or a lack of objective evaluation of strategy. Jonathon brings a healthy dose of realism to this conversation that is refreshing. He claims that a disconnect between Alignment’s four components – Individual, Team, Organization, and Market – can have cascading effects throughout the product lifecycle. Each builds off the others, but when there is alignment, these collaborate to instill a high-performance mindset.

Catch the full episode to hear more from Jonathon Hensley, including –

The post 86 / Optimize Alignment For High Performance appeared first on ITX Corp..

Vision and strategy and building a delightful experience are all necessary pieces of the product manager playbook. But Steven Haines says it’s not enough. Product leaders need business acumen, the oxygen that keeps your product alive.

As founder of Sequent Learning Networks and the Business Acumen Institute, Steven Haines has trained countless leaders in the fields of business and product management. In this episode, he explains what he sees as the primary challenge to their success and offers insights in finding the solution.

Too many product leaders, he explains, come to the product manager role bearing excess baggage from their functional paradigms. They come into a job that requires them to analyze data, detect industry signals, and manage internal operations. All these are different functions. We need to get them thinking in these different ways, as opposed to the function from which they’ve come.

“Senior executives need to create an environment that encourages this nurturing or cultivation of talent,” Steven adds, “to include key dimensions of business acumen. Go beyond understanding your markets and your customers. Think about how they operate and their mindset. Leveling up those skills is critical.”

Catch the entire podcast to hear all of Steven’s advice on developing business acumen in product leaders – not just for the hand-picked “rising stars,” but creating the tide that raises entire cohorts of future business leaders.

The post 85 / Product Management Is Business Management appeared first on ITX Corp..

The role of product leader isn’t just about numbers and KPIs. It’s really setting the stage for your teams to boost their capacity to build customer value, says Megan Murphy.

In this episode of Product Momentum, Sean and Paul catch up with Megan Murphy, VP of Product at Hotjar. “What got us to now won’t get us to next,” Megan reminds us. “So my approach to ‘getting to next’ was to tap into different communities and make the team composition feel more ‘diverse.’ That may not be the right word, but I knew I wanted to have a great mix of people from all around the world.”

The beauty of diversity is the breadth of perspectives it brings to a team. The power of diversity comes from exposing blind spots that get in the way of honest engagement. “When we’re honest with each other,” Megan remarks, “we can get real work done.”

At Hotjar, Megan primes her teams for success by recruiting talent through nontraditional channels to make sure her teams represent a range of perspectives.

Tune in to hear more from Megan Murphy. Learn how her interests have expanded beyond the product itself into the go-to market, the category creation, and harvesting the value in the category. She urges us product leaders to ask: are we designing a product for a new category? Or a product that harvests value in an existing category?

The post 84 / Diversity Boosts Capacity To Build Customer Value appeared first on ITX Corp..

What is the role of design in product development for startups? And what characteristics do the great designers share? In this episode of the Product Momentum Podcast, John Zeratsky joins host Paul Gebel to explain – interestingly, using David McCullough’s The Wright Brothers biography as a backdrop.

The book “provided this interesting illustration of the difference between craft and invention. Designers,” John says, “obsess about craft. When the Wright brothers were building bikes, they were craftsmen – detail-oriented, patient, and introspective. And they made super high-quality bikes.… But when they invented the airplane,” he continues, “they leveraged those skills to do something very, very different. And that is much more akin to the role of design at startups that are trying to do something new.”

John Zeratsky ought to know. With a career journey that includes both craftsman and inventor roles, John is now co-founder and General Partner at Character, where he supports startups with capital and sprints. He and partner Jake Knapp noticed that in the world of venture capital, product was often neglected. Yet product is the foundation of every business; a business cannot be successful without a successful product.

“If you’re starting a company, the hardest thing about it – the core thing – is the product,” John says. “If there’s no product, none of the rest matters.” Design’s role is not to answer the what, John adds. It’s the how. “How are we going to figure out this tricky problem? How are we going to figure out what our customers want and describe it in a way that makes sense for them?”

Tune in to hear John’s insights about how to improve your team’s design sprint process. And be sure to catch his breakdown of the three levels of the facilitation pyramid, and learn why OATS matters if you’re a startup interested in partnering with Character.

The post 83 / Design’s True Purpose: Answer The How appeared first on ITX Corp..

As product managers, we’re taught to prioritize customer needs above all else. If that’s correct, where does threat modeling land in our list of priorities? After all, if we can’t provide a secure solution, our users will go elsewhere. Chris Romeo, CEO and co-founder of Security Journey, suggests we “shift left” to get these concepts into the conversation as soon as possible.

In this episode of the Product Momentum Podcast, Chris joins Paul and guest co-host Jonathan Coupal, ITX Chief Security Officer, for an impassioned conversation about Security and Privacy – often-overlooked dimensions of application and system quality.

“Security and privacy are rarely written ‘on the same napkin’ as the new product idea,” Chris says. “Lots of times, they end up being added later, resulting in lots of developer rework. So we use this concept of ‘shift left’ to describe the notion of moving that security mindset earlier into the development process.”

Chris’ mission is to bring security culture change to all organizations. In this episode, he discusses collaborative threat modeling and other tactics that can feed your organization’s security culture. Intuitively, we already know how to threat model, Chris adds. We just need to adopt this mindset when building our products.

Listen in to hear more from Chris Romeo about threat modeling for product managers, including:

The post 82 / Threat Modeling for Product Managers appeared first on ITX Corp..

Gamification mechanics work because they motivate user audiences to participate, engage, and act. Yu-kai Chou, who began work in this space nearly 20 years ago, explains why the application of game technique is so much more than points, badges, and leaderboards. It extracts all the fundamental components in games and applies them to real-world and business activities. 

In this episode, Yu-kai breaks down gamification into digestible pieces in a captivating conversation with Paul Gebel and guest host, ITX Senior Product Manager Zack Kane. Yu-Kai is the President of Octalysis Group and the creator of the Octalysis Framework, a human-focused gamification framework.

It’s all about motivation and engagement, Yu-kai says. “Gamification is making sure that what we build is not just something that works. It has to be something that motivates us to do things.”

Yu-kai Chou discusses explicit versus implicit gamification, as well as white hat and black hat design. Both are useful, he adds, but only when aligned to the product’s design, customer base, and the company’s goals.

Tune in to hear lots of examples that your team will find helpful, from Porsche to SEC compliance, to applying game technique principles in your product. Applying these principles will be sure to engage and delight your users.

The post 81 / Why Gamification Drives Human Behavior appeared first on ITX Corp..

In this episode of the Product Momentum Podcast, Sean and Paul welcome Ronke Majekodunmi, Senior Product Manager at PayPal, for an inside look at product leadership. Especially during tumultuous times, it’s the leader’s job to acknowledge the context that the team is working in and to support them both personally and professionally. This can be done in big or small ways, and she shares several easy-to-apply examples.

Ronke Majekodunmi also points to imposter syndrome as another challenge of product leadership. What if my dev team doesn’t trust me? Am I good enough? What’ll happen if I screw this up?

Her advice is not to minimize the feelings or push them aside. But rather to embrace the vulnerability and work through it.

“To overcome this, I verbally acknowledge to myself and others, ‘I don’t have all the answers, but let’s go sort it out together,’” she said. “The scary thing is that’s actually become the secret to my success. Recognize you don’t know everything; then go out and learn as much as possible from your team.”

Listen in to catch Ronke’s insights about building trust on teams, and how making decisions “within the triangle” helps ensure that your team is working together toward a shared vision. At the end of the day, she says, “It’s everybody’s perspective that makes the product successful.”

The post 80 / Lessons in Fearless Product Leadership appeared first on ITX Corp..

Josh Seiden broke into product development from the designer’s perspective, crafting beautiful things he could be very proud of. Sometimes they worked; sometimes they didn’t change human behavior at all. “That deafening silence that comes when no users engage with your product is just a terrible feeling,” he says. So what we’re always trying to do is generate the maximum outcome from the minimum output.

In this episode of the Product Momentum Podcast, Josh presents a simple but thought-provoking framework, called The Logic Model. The framework introduces three important levels: outputs, outcomes, and impact. Outputs, Josh adds, are the stuff we make. Outcomes are what we get from having made the stuff. Impact is the change in user behavior that drives business results.

To change human behavior, Josh adds, product teams need to do three things: understand how their work aligns with the overall strategy; express that strategy in terms of outcomes – not outputs; and be aware of the big uncertainties that are out there. That requires discovery.

“Discovery may reduce your team’s delivery velocity,” Josh says. “But it also means your product development is more efficient. Prioritizing the things that create value…outcomes over outputs.

Tune in to catch the entire conversation with Josh Seiden.

The post 79 / Create Outcomes That Change Human Behavior appeared first on ITX Corp..