You have a lot of tools to help you learn about yours customers, such as customer visits, interviews, and surveys. One of my favorites is ethnography. I find some of the best insights, insights that competitors may have missed, come from observing customers. One form of this is called web ethnography and an expert at it, as well as other customer research tools, is Bill McDowell. He is a research practitioner, conducting customer research for a wide variety of customers in his role as COO of Accelerant Research.

In this discussion, Bill breaks down the steps for putting web ethnography into use.

TEI 254: The right way to use web-ethnography to learn about customers – with Bill McDowell

Welcome to Product Mastery Now, where you learn the 7 knowledge areas for product mastery.  We teach the product management practices that elevate your influence and create products your customers love as you move toward product mastery. To learn about all seven areas and assess your strengths in product mastery, go to my website —  https://productmasterynow.com — and click the Podcast button at the top of the page.  Hosted by Chad McAllister, product management professor and practitioner.

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The essential knowledge areas that give product managers more influence and success
Today we’re talking about the seven knowledge areas for product mastery. These are the knowledge areas that make us successful as product masters who know how to create new value for our customers. They also lead to more influence in our organizations. This is the beginning of a series where we’ll dive into each of the seven knowledge areas.
Summary of topics discussed for product managers
Watch the full interview with PowerPoint slides on the Product Mastery now YouTube channel.
[1:14] Who is Chad McAllister?
I’m a product management professor, practitioner, trainer, and host of the Product Mastery Now podcast.
[3:19] Chad’s path to product management

* Worked in software project management
* Became fascinated with why we sometimes miss the mark in developing products for customers
* Earned a PhD in Innovation to study this problem more deeply
* Discovered the Product Development and Management Association (PDMA)
* Learned the PDMA product management and product innovation Body of Knowledge (BoK)
* Created an online training system for people to learn the BoK, including the seven knowledge areas
* Contributed to the BoK, which is now complied in a book released every few years

[13:40] Co-author of the 2024 edition of the Product Development and Management Body of Knowledge: A Guidebook for Product Innovation Training and Certification
[15:31] Why did Chad co-author the 2024 BoK?

* I value the BoK and want to improve it
* Opportunity to give back to the product management community
* Not for book royalties—all sales support PDMA, a non-profit organization

[17:10] Who is the BoK for?

* Product managers, innovators, or leaders seeking comprehensive guidance on the required disciplines for increasing the success of product innovation
* Those planning a new career in product or innovation management
* Everyone committed to earning the New Product Development Professional (NPDP) recognition to demonstrate their understanding of product innovation

[21:55] Why might you be interested in the BoK?

* Product professionals need a proven framework to fill gaps in their knowledge while also deepening their understanding
* The BoK provides an established framework for a wide cross-section of product and service industries at various levels of an organization
* Only PDMA can provide this, based on researching and curating the body of knowledge since 1976

[26:23] What’s next?
Over the next few weeks, we’ll discuss the seven knowledge areas:

* Product Innovation Management
* Strategy
* Portfolio Management
* Process
* Design & Development
* Market Research
* Culture & Teams

Watch the full interview with PowerPoint slides on the Product Mastery now YouTube channel.
Put the information Chad shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide.
Useful links:

* Check out the 2024 Product Development and Management Body of Knowledge by Allan Anderson, Chad McAllister, and Ernie Harris
* Find out how the Rapid Product Mastery Experience,

486: The 7 Knowledge Areas of Product Mastery – with Chad McAllister, PhD

The habits that set apart transformational product leaders
Today we are talking about why organizations are increasingly facing the need to transform and how to navigate those changes. If you have experienced a big change, you already know firsthand how challenging it is. All of us need to know the principles that make transformations successful, and that is what we’ll takeaway from this discussion.
Joining us is John Rossman, who was an early executive at Amazon and led the launch of the Amazon Marketplace (which allowed third-party businesses to sell on Amazon). He is a four-time author including best seller “The Amazon Way” and “Think Like Amazon,” as well as a sought-after business advisor and keynote speaker. His expertise is on leadership for innovation and business transformation.
His most recent book is Big Bet Leadership: Your Transformation Playbook for Winning in the Hyper-Digital Era.  
Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers
[2:41] What advice have you received that helped you think about how to have more successful influence in the organization?
I had a longtime business partner, Steve, who told me, “After Amazon, your superpower is always clarifying and simplifying the discussion, the meeting, or the communication.” I recognized from Steve that one of the things I learned at Amazon was how to clarify and simplify. Especially in a complex situation, the person who can clarify and simplify the communication is the controller of the situation.
After I left Amazon, one of my key clients was the Gates Foundation, and Greg Widmyer told me, “You do a really nice job taking the little strategies, inserts, and mechanisms from Amazon and delicately implementing them and influencing our work. I think you ought to write a book about it.” The ability craft a story and influence others at scale through a book was a great piece of advice and something I had never thought about before.
[5:48] What are Big Bets and why are they important to organizations?
A Big Bet is any initiative, strategy, or project that both has the potential for significant business impact and business upside and has significant multi-sided risks or assumptions. They are not simple initiatives or straightforward capabilities.
Big Bets typically happen at the enterprise level but can happen at the team or product level. They get called lots of things like market repositioning, merger integration, digital transformation, AI strategy, etc.
Big Bets have a 70-85% failure rate, but those are all errors of commission where an initiative was taken and it didn’t work as scheduled. The biggest failure point is typically the benefits. But those statistics don’t count the errors of omission where a Big Bet was needed but one wasn’t taken. When you see a company go from great to average or from average to irrelevant, a Big Bet was needed.
The framing of my book, Big Bet Leadership: Your Transformation Playbook for Winning in the Hyper-Digital Era, is critical to answer the question, why are Big Bets needed? It’s my hypothesis that these past 30 years of digital change has been the warmup innings for the next era, which we call the hyper-digital era. The companies that can make a core capability out of transformational change, high potential impact, and high risk will win. In addition to being operationally excellent and great at incremental moves, they are going to be great at these transformational capabilities, these business model changes that are so essential. Those are the Big Bets.
[9:33] Tell us about solving wicked problems.
If you asked me, “John, what are you good at?” I would say I’m good at solving wicked problems—multi-sided, non-obvious problems. Technology is just one of the mega forces that I think will drive this next era. Mega forces include change, labor force,

485: How product managers can navigate “Big-Bet” transformations – with John Rossman

Tools for making voice-of-the-customer insights more accessible to product managers
Today we are talking about aspects of the Market Research knowledge area for product mastery. Specifically, we are discussing how to overcome challenges collecting actionable customer insights.
Helping us with this is Prashant Mahajan, the founder of  Zeda.io. Prashant is an experienced product manager and leader, having guided product development in several organizations.
In these experiences, he identified a critical gap: Many Product Managers are unsure if they are building the right products because they can’t access customer feedback, customer insight, or sentiment. This led him to developing Zeda.io, which is also focused on the importance of publicly sharing product roadmaps and progress with customers.
Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers
[2:52] You founded Zeda.io to help product managers capture the voice of the customer and get actionable customer insights. What challenges did you encounter as a product manager that gave you experience for improving how to gain customer insights?
We learn about product management best practices, like solving customer problems and making a strategy, but most of the product management I saw in companies was about operations. Updating an Excel sheet or going to a meeting was taking up too much of my mental bandwidth. I thought there could be a better way to do product management, where operations are taken care of by software. We took inspiration from GitHub AI Copilot and Chat GPT. We started with the vision to make product management simpler and smarter.
Product management can be divided into product discovery, prioritization, building, and launch. Most product people are good at building things, but they don’t know what problem to solve. If people knew what to build, we would not see companies launch useless products and fail.
I experienced these challenges firsthand in my previous company. You get input from sales, support, customer-facing teams, and user research. As the company becomes bigger and bigger, the distance between the product team and the user keeps increasing. Meeting with people is like playing Telephone, and by the time you get information, it might be four or five people away from the customer. You can’t go to one place and find out what your customers are asking. I wanted to make a platform where you can centralize the customer voice, analyze it, generate insights, and make the key takeaways actionable.
The product team, including designers and engineers, needs to know why they are building things. If you tell them the problem and the impact of solving it, they can brainstorm together and ship it out. It’s critical that you’re using your resources for the right problem, which will create impact, and not just randomly building things.
[10:24] After you built a product to solve your problem, how did you validate the pain points and core problems for the larger product management community?
I am a strong proponent of talking to people. In the last three and a half years, I have had a call with a product leader on average every day. I’ve talked to CPOs, VPs, and people who have just started as the first PM at a startup.
The core problem as a product leader is there are so many ideas and a lack of confidence on deciding which idea to pursue. You need to justify the ROI of building a product.
One CPO said he needed our product to be insurance for his job. If the product didn’t work, he would be fired. He needed the data to save his job.
[14:18] How does your product at Zeda.io help product managers?
We focus on product discovery and planning. We centralize all your customer voice or input from customers and customer-facing teams in one place so you don’t have to juggle meetings and Excel sheets and you don’t lose any informa...

484: Making customer research easier – with Prashant Mahajan

How product managers can design their customer experience journey
We all want to create products that customers find valuable and even delightful. But accomplishing that is complicated, and some teams lose focus on the real objective or start without a clear vision for what they need to accomplish. How can using the customer experience journey help you make better products?
We are about to find out with Jason Friedman. Jason has started successful businesses in several industries including medical diagnostics, automotive, spirits, and digital media. He has taken his experience and knowledge and focused it to help companies gain an unfair advantage over their competition through the art and science of designing their “customer experience journey.” He is founder and CEO of CXFormula™, which works with entrepreneurs to Fortune 100 companies including Nike, Universal Studios, Burger King, Bank of America, and others.
Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers
[2:26] What is the customer experience journey?
The customer experience journey is the perception that a customer has after interacting with your product, service, brand, and team. The most important piece is how people feel.
Today the customer experience journey is more important than it ever has been. Today, AI has dominated everything, so people can create a new product or idea in minutes. Where we shine as product managers is in the experience people have with our product. We can make it amazing, and that’s what differentiates us in the crowded market.
[5:38] I’d like to provide two scenarios. First, sometimes startup founders develop a product to solve their own problem and assume others experience the problem the same as they do. Second, established companies can believe they are the experts in their domain and tell customers what they need. In both scenarios, the customer experience is not considered. How would you avoid these problems?
The customer experience journey is all the touch points a customer has with your product, including brand, service, support, usability, and instructions.
There’s that famous quote from Henry Ford, “If I asked people what they wanted, they would have told me faster horses,” and Steve Jobs has been quoted as having a similar perspective. Often, customers don’t have the vision for creating a paradigm-shifting solution. Those companies might be right that their customers don’t know, but they miss the deep understanding of their customers. When we don’t truly understand our customers and what they really need and want, we can create a product that may be awesome but that customers are not going to adopt.
I don’t want to discourage anyone from thinking outside the box. If you only rely on what your customers tell you, you might miss out on coming up with some amazing innovation. But finding out how to really understand our customers and their true wants and desires is problematic for many of us. We don’t really know, so we rely on superficial information.
My background is in theatre working behind-the-scenes. In theatre productions, the focus is almost exclusively on the audience—the customer. Everything we do on stage is about the customers’ reaction.
In our businesses, we often lost sight of the customer. A business owner who built a product for themselves might have been the customer at one point, but often they have the curse of knowledge. They know too much and lost sight of where their customers are. They might overdevelop or create something that’s not aligned with the customers’ true needs.
One of the tricks is to get inside the customer’s head. Pretend like you’re going to play your customer on stage as a character. Get into character. Many famous actors use method acting. They go deep in understanding that character so much so that they know what...

483: Nailing the customer experience to improve product value – with Jason Friedman

How product managers can empower their teams
Today we are talking about how product leaders can create more effective teams by using a people-first leadership approach.
Joining us is Diana Stepner, Head of Product for Education at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. Her approach to product leadership empowers individuals, fosters collaboration, and connects with people in an authentic way. She is also a product leadership instructor on Maven and has held leadership and advisor product positions.
Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers
[2:09] What does people-first product leadership mean?
Launching people is just as important as launching products. When people feel supported, their product efforts shine. When I was defining my leadership style, a colleague referred to me as a servant leader. I appreciated the notion, but I didn’t really like the phrase. I’m not an attendant to my team; I lead my team. Instead, I wanted to acknowledge that I like putting people first, and that’s what I expect for my team. That’s where the phrase people-first product leadership came from.
[3:33] What are the key capabilities that leaders need if they’re going to adopt a people-first product leadership approach?

* Positive leadership character: Show traits such as integrity, responsibility, forgiveness, and compassion.
* Creating psychological safety: Establish an environment where team members feel safe to take risks, speak up, share their ideas, ask questions, be honest, and make mistakes.
* Promoting a learning culture: Provide the opportunity to continually learn and improve as a team. That enables individuals to adapt to changes and strive for excellence. That’s really important in product management, because things don’t stay the same. We always have new technologies and new competitors, and product management continues to evolve. A learning culture ensures we’re staying up to speed on all the areas that impact our product.

[5:37] Tell us more about the aspects of positive leadership character.

* Developing people: This takes integrity and responsibility. Focus on developing people, not just products. Help people gain skills, confidence, and knowledge, so the team can work better together.
* Self-awareness and emotional intelligence: This takes compassion and forgiveness. Help individuals build their self-awareness and emotional intelligence. Understand your own emotions and understand and appreciate the emotions of others. Express empathy. I use an exercise called an Emotions Wheel that helps people identify their emotions.
* Active listening: Develop a listening style that encourages people to be engaged and creates an environment that’s not competitive. Show that you’re being attentive to, comprehending, and internalizing what’s being discussed. Be able to summarize and move forward together.

[9:22] Tell us more about psychological safety.

* Empathy and understanding: Create an environment where people feel comfortable to tackle the unknowns.
* Experimentation: Encourage your team to experiment, try different ways to approach problems, innovate, and learn from failures.
* Sharing mistakes: Build a culture where people feel comfortable openly discussing and learning from mistakes.

[14:28] Tell us more about how the Emotions Wheel can help create psychological safety.
The Emotions Wheel is an exercise I do at the start of my people-first product leadership course on Maven. It’s a great icebreaker. People put a dot on the Emotions Wheel next to the emotion they’re feeling. It helps everybody understand what others are feeling and gives an indication to me as the teacher of how to best incorporate individuals into the session. At the end of the day, we ask participants how they’re feeling no...

TEI 254: The right way to use web-ethnography to learn about customers – with Bill McDowell

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