Product Thinking

Dave Dame is Director of Accessibility at Microsoft. He has extensive experience in design thinking, product management, and agile delivery. Dave joins Melissa Perri on this week’s Product Thinking podcast show to discuss how making the workplace accessible and inclusive to employees with disabilities is a crucial first step in making truly accessible products. 

Here are some key points you’ll hear Melissa and Dave talk about in this episode:

Dave's role at Microsoft, and how he got involved in product. [2:25]

Dave helps product managers understand the diversity of their users, to ensure that they're creating products that are accessible. Product managers and designers should not be designing for people with disabilities, but with people with disabilities. "There's a difference between meeting the standard and having incredible experiences. We don't want to just meet their needs, we want to give them phenomenal experiences where they become champions of our product," Dave tells Melissa. [6:16]

Designing with persons with disabilities demands that product managers educate themselves on multiple uses of disabilities, and the multiple types of disabilities. It also means learning what tools are being used by persons with disabilities to manipulate your product, and understanding what your competitors are doing. [7:50]

The first step to making sure you're being inclusive to everybody is to hire people with disabilities. [12:50]

Everyone is going to experience some form of disability at some point in their life, so product managers need to build products that can be used by many different inputs, and in many different ways, or else they're going to limit who can use their product. [15:47]

Focus on the usability life cycle instead of the product life cycle. If product managers don't start thinking about that now, they're going to lose long term loyalty and won't be able to support the modern places that use their product. Product managers have to think about it as the inevitable use case for everybody instead of a single unique use case. [18:00]

Any company that is using its accessibility capability as a marketing edge, is a company that's doing it right. [22:21]

No two people with the same disability are the same. [28:17]

Product leaders and managers need to be mindful of individuals with invisible disabilities, and need to be better at being proactive. They need to make sure that no one is being left behind. Different thinking is needed to push towards the future. The only way this can happen is through equitable platforms that allow for diverse thought to exist. [29:32]

When you speak up for your particular needs it becomes relevant for other people in different situations. Disabled people should not have to suffer in silence. [33:07]

Resources

Dave Dame | LinkedIn | Twitter

In this Dear Melissa segment, Melissa answers subscribers’ questions about which part of an organization really owns user research, the scope of a product team’s vision and strategy, and how to tell when your product has too many features. 

Q: How do you delineate the goals of product manager and product marketing research? [2:03]

Q: Should every product manager have a 2 to 10-year vision and strategy, or should each respective PM rather craft division and strategy only covering the current strategic intent? [7:27]

Q: How do you know when you have too many features in your product? Any suggestions on how to change the mindset that more is better? [13:26]

Resources

Melissa Perri on LinkedIn | Twitter

MelissaPerri.com

Teresa Torres is a Product Discovery Coach, author, and keynote speaker. She is also the founder of The Product Talk Academy where she helps product teams adopt continuous product discovery practices. Teresa joins Melissa to discuss how product managers can implement strong continuous discovery habits into their product practices and how to communicate that work via roadmaps. 

Here are some key points you’ll hear Melissa and Teresa talk about in this episode:

How Teresa first got involved in product management. [1:12]

The heart of continuous discovery is not about shoving products on our team, but about creating products with them. It’s also about bringing the customer into the building process and figuring out how we make our products work for them. [6:28]

We need to be always careful of who we are including when we define the customer and who we are leaving out. We can’t design a product for everybody but we can be more thoughtful and deliberate about boundaries. [7:26]

Teresa says product leaders need to be deliberate about their ideas, as this will help them make more strategic decisions. [9:41]

Teresa explains the framework of continuous discovery. [11:26]

There are three components of discovering opportunities: understanding what success looks like to us in our organizations, defining the opportunity space, and making sure our solutions align with the other two components. [12:40]

It doesn’t matter what method we use to discover opportunities. What matters is that we need to be outcome-focused, we need to find the right problems to solve, and then we need to find solutions that fit both the problem and the outcome. [14:15]

A big issue with many companies is that they aren’t being deliberate about their target market. They miss out on opportunities because of this. [17:50]

We have to be customer-centric in how we set and frame our outcomes. [22:20]

We need trust that our employees work at our companies because they care about the customer. We need to trust that they’re going to do the right thing and do their best at work every day with what they’re given. When we do that, their compensation does not need to be tied to their outcome. [25:59]

Teresa talks through how to communicate discovery work on roadmaps without getting tied to a fixed timeline. [28:35]

We don’t have to be constantly looking for the next task because if we are following continuous discovery practices, we will always have the next opportunity there. [37:15]

We need to focus on both business value and customer value. We have to serve our customers in ways that will create value for the business. [39:04]

Teresa talks about the target audience for her book. [41:45]

Resources

Teresa Torres | LinkedIn | Twitter

Product Talk

Continuous Discovery Habits

In this episode of Product Thinking, Melissa answers subscribers’ questions about compliance, dealing with physical and digital goods simultaneously, and what good UX looks like in really complicated problems.

Q: I started working in product compliance at a company that offers an alternative credit product. It's been challenging for me because product teams do not see the value in my role and do not want to engage in the build-out or with issues that come up as it takes away from them shipping new features. We're a heavily regulated space, but they don't seem to care. And it's making me want to search for a new job. My previous company valued product compliance and saw me as an asset to the team, not a hindrance. How can I help the product managers see the value of my role help? [00:55]

Q: I worked for a retailer that has offline and online shops, and we're trying to move towards being more product-driven. I've read a lot and listened to your answers about organizing product teams to be focused on specific value, streams and jobs to be done, and to keep them as autonomous as possible. But how should this work for companies that are not entirely digital? Our product team needs to work very closely with teams like retail, marketing, and creative when it comes to new features. So, we struggle with setting up teams that can ideate and execute entirely on their own. [05:40]

Q: I think it’s the trend that many people equate good UX to simplicity. Cause simple whizzer like workflow might be okay for a phone app or web page in the B to C world, but I work on a product that is helping users to tackle complex 3D engineering tasks, construction of huge infrastructures, simulations of physical phenomenon, building of airplanes etc. These tasks can't be simple by definition and require a lot of flexibility and functionality. In my experience, blind simplification of the workflow often leads to a UX quality decrease. It's a challenge to get UX designers onboard with this very niche user workflow. What is the best way to approach this challenge, and what UX principles would work best in a complex product environment? [09:15]

Resources

Melissa Perri on LinkedIn | Twitter

MelissaPerri.com

How to Succeed as a Senior Product Leader with Georgie Smallwood

Melissa Perri’s guest on this week’s Product Thinking Podcast is Justin Anovick. Justin is the Chief Product Officer at Optimizely, a company providing digital platform software services. He is a creative thinker and provides great leadership for his team. Justin joins Melissa to discuss how to navigate through mergers and acquisitions with your organization and how to get all members to play on the same team.

Here are some key points you’ll hear Melissa and Justin talk about in this episode:

Why Justin became a product officer. [1:01]

Understanding the customer sales cycle allows the product team to know what their customers and prospects are looking for. [3:55]

Designing a product takes specific processes; if you change something at the last minute that change will have a major impact. [7:23]

The questions, challenges, and differences that Justin has to confront now with his new merger and acquisition. [9:09]

It’s very important that everyone is on the same page and understands the vision for the company. “We have to build demos, we have to build the messaging, we have to agree and communicate with the other side to make sure that we're spot on,” he tells Melissa. The vision can’t be conceptualized in a tagline, slogan, or image. The vision has to be about what the product is going to be in the future. [12:15]

The more legitimate you can make a product, the better off you will be. The product team also plays a critical role in this. [15:35]

In ensuring that a merger can be successful, you have to do things to scale. This sometimes means being okay with processes not being as high quality or going as expected. It also means integrating teams and being people first. [18:52]

Invest more in the processes that you're doing well, and come up to average in your weaker areas. [20:52]

Justin uses StrengthFinders quizzes with his team to understand the skills that they have, and how those skills complement him and one another. Managers need to understand that it’s not about adapting our teams to think like we do, but letting their skills complement the skills that we have. [22:36]

Justin’s key focus is making sure everybody in the company understands their role, the direction the company is headed, the mission, and staying in tune with collecting key feedback from key individuals across the organization. [28:47]

Justin talks about the ways he sets goals for Optimizely. [29:36]

Test for understanding by using the passive check. This is simply checking with multiple people and using direct communication. We get more value from this because we can ask follow-up questions, and we don’t have to consult surveys. [34:09]

Resources

Justin Anovick | LinkedIn | Twitter

Optimizely

In this Dear Melissa segment, Melissa answers subscribers’ questions about product operations, how to structure teams in an organization cross-functionally, and knowing when it’s time to scale your product.

Q: What is the problem product operations solves? What does success look like for these teams? How should these teams be structured? Who should these teams report to? [1:08]

Q: How do you know in advance when your product is ready to scale and how do you prepare from a roadmap funding perspective? [11:41]

Q: Can you provide some sample product and design team organization structures that you’ve seen work well? Where do product and business analysts sit in the organization? Do designers, assuming they're part of the product management team umbrella, have assigned PMs to partner with? Do you see product directors who manage product managers as stronger in the company domain, or great PM craft practitioners? [16:38]

Resources

Melissa Perri on LinkedIn | Twitter

MelissaPerri.com

Melissa Perri’s guest on this week’s Product Thinking Podcast is Ray McKenzie. Ray is the CEO and founder of StartingPoint Technologies, an organization that develops solutions for service-based companies. He has expertise across a variety of fields, most notably strategy development, workforce analytics, and behavioral analysis. Ray joins Melissa to discuss the ideal marketing strategy that product leaders should be adopting.

Here are some key points you’ll hear Melissa and Ray talk about in this episode:

How Ray got into product management. [1:16]

Product leaders need to consult with customers and rely on other uses and experiences to outline how to build products. [5:01]

One of the biggest challenges when it comes to a company startup is opening yourself up to criticism and feedback. However, allowing yourself to get feedback, both positive and negative, can benefit your business. [7:41]

Melissa expresses that when building a product, leaders’ main focus should be on how they can make products easy for customers to use. [12:00]

Product management should be tied into strategic decisions in the organization. Product leaders need to be present in decision-making so that they can understand the vision for the business and build products to align with that. [13:50]

Product is a revenue driver and not a cost center. [16:58]

Being product-led is a go-to-market strategy. Building a product-led company means that product building becomes ingrained in the day-to-day work. [18:07]

The different go-to-market strategies that companies need to be thinking about, and how they should decide on which strategy is right for them. [26:53]

The main way to experiment with your go-to-market strategy, or test it, is to talk to people. Talk to your ideal customer, your colleagues, and do market research. “If you just talk to people they will lead you in the direction of where it is easiest to go. And if you're taught to understand who your ideal customer is, talk to as many people of that kind as possible, and they'll tell you where you should invest your go-to-market dollars or go-to-market strategy,” Ray tells Melissa. [30:13]

Companies that aren't software-based need to think about their ideal customers, what their competition is doing, and what differentiates their product from everyone else. [32:52]

Resources

Ray McKenzie | LinkedIn | Twitter

StartingPoint

Q: I have been offered a senior leadership role, but part of me feels I still haven’t proven myself with any actual company outcomes as an individual contributor. Should I take the role, where I’d be fairly hands-off, or spend more time honing my craft? [0:46]

Q: Is there a way to evaluate an organization before applying? [7:04]

Q: Do you have any tips for finding a good VP of product for a growth-stage startup? [12:18]

Resources

Melissa Perri on LinkedIn | Twitter

MelissaPerri.com

Melissa Perri’s guest on this week’s Product Thinking Podcast is Marty Cagan. Marty is a product executive, the Founder and Product Partner of the Silicon Valley Product Group and the author of “Inspired: How to Create Products Customers Love”. He has over two decades experience in the field of product management. Marty joins Melissa to discuss product management and how to become the best product manager you can possibly be.

Here are some key points you’ll hear Melissa and Marty talk about in this episode:

The essence of product is how well the team works together to solve problems in ways customers love, but that which also works for the business. [1:31]

The focus of Marty’s book, Empowered, is helping leadership up their game. If a product team is not performing well, the fault lies with the leaders. [2:58]

The product leader’s first and main job is to make sure that their product team thrives, and that they do their jobs well. Product managers should be encouraging and coaching their teams, and inspiring them so that they can set up their teams for success. [4:23]

“Product teams are only as good as their product managers...if those product managers are not good, it all falls apart and then it doesn't matter how much singing and dancing that product leader can do with the other executives if he or she can't deliver results,” Marty tells Melissa. [8:00]

What causes organizations to use tactics that only focus on cost reduction. [13:28]

The advice Marty gives to clients on what they can do to change their organizations. [17:38]

Becoming a great product manager is about learning from, and being coached by someone who’s dedicated to developing and coaching you. [22:17]

How to know which organizations will be willing to train you and how to find a product leader who is going to put in the time and effort to show you the ropes. [24:30]

Product leaders hire based on a person’s potential. It’s not about an academic qualification but more of a belief in the person’s ability to reach where product leaders think it can be. [27:22]

What organizations should be doing to help bring their less tech savvy employees up to speed, for the benefit of their product teams. [30:28]

One of the biggest issues surrounding product management. [34:59]

The ten keys to successful transformation. [40:38]

Resources

Marty Cagan | LinkedIn | Twitter

Silicon Valley Product Group

Melissa Perri’s guest on this week’s Product Thinking Podcast is Amy Radin. Amy is a growth advisor and problem solver for FinTech and MarTech businesses. She has spent over two decades in the marketing, digital, and innovation sector and is currently a member of the Fast Company executive board. Amy joins Melissa to discuss implementing digital transformation in our organizations through relationships.

Here are some key points you’ll hear Melissa and Amy talk about in this episode:

Amy’s professional background and how she got into digital transformation. [1:29]

You can’t solve new problems with old tools. Helping your organization feel comfortable and embrace a new way of doing processes is key. [6:16]

It is important to build relationships with the influencers and decision-makers within an organization when you are seeking to implement digital transformation. Get a clear understanding of what success means to them. Once they believe that your first priority is to make them successful, you will win their trust and support. [9:01]

When building organizational teams, there is no one-size-fits-all. You have to build on what exists within the organization at the moment as well as acknowledge that there are elements of culture that affect the organizational structure. [14:53]

If employees are unable to adapt to new realities of change in their organizations, leaders have to ask themselves if they’ve given them enough opportunity to build new skills. [17:57]

“You need to build a very diverse team when you're building change...it’s internal and external people who are bringing different life experiences, different backgrounds. You need diversity to solve hard problems,” Amy stresses. [19:49]

We must focus on developing real empathy and deep understanding of our customers’ needs and bring this insight to the organization in a way they will find compelling. [24:32]

How Amy gets her teams to take initiative. [24:45]

Even on the worst days we have to maintain a sense of optimism and believe that we will get there. [30:22]

“You have to look for the actions and behaviors that the organization and the leadership have done either at the organization, or in their prior roles that indicate they understand that you have a common expectation of what transformation and change means and what it takes,” Amy remarks. [35:34]

The behavioral evidence Amy looks for that tells her that the company is ready for transformation. [38:14]

Resources

Amy Radin | LinkedIn | Twitter