425: Three ways to escape gut-feeling and rapidly boost innovation to markets – with Ulrike Laubner-Kelleher

How product managers can get market-driven data to make product decisions quickly

This episode is sponsored by PDMA, the Product Development and Management Association. PDMA is a global community of professional members whose skills, expertise and experience power the most recognized and respected innovative companies in the world. PDMA is also the longest-running professional association for product managers, leaders, and innovators, having started in 1976. I have enjoyed being a member of PDMA for more than a decade, finding their resources and network very valuable. Learn more about them at PDMA.org.

PDMA invited me to their conference, which was in Orlando, Florida, to interview some of their speakers. This speaker spoke on the Three ways to escape gut-feeling and boost innovation rapidly to markets. The topic is about techniques to increase the innovation success rate. For example, by applying Lean innovation, you can speed up development by up to 60% and increase profitability by 31%.

Ulrike Laubner-Kelleher is a sought-after mentor, educator, and presenter on the topics of product management, innovation and teams efficiency. She helps product teams get ahead of their competitors by finding innovations quickly and developing and launching complex hardware and software products on time.

Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers

[2:04] You shared a method during your talk called CuCoCo for getting market-driven data to make product decisions quickly. Can you walk us through the method?

CuCoCo is an abbreviation for Customer, Context, and Company. It’s a method for market-driven analysis. In many companies, data to make market-driven decisions is missing for several reasons—people don’t have time, they don’t know how to do it correctly, or nobody tells them what to do. CuCoCo is a method to empower product managers to find the right data.

First, we need to talk to the customer. We should have innovation that fulfills a purpose for the customer. The customer tells us about their problems, and it’s our job to find the right solutions. We need the right questions to ask customers. The product manager needs to get the answers that are used for setting up the product strategy and for marketing and development, so we have clarity.

Start with the customer and find out what the problem is. The questions we equip product managers with help them find clarity on the buyer persona (used for marketing) and the user persona (used for development). The more interviews you do, you see the priority of problems and requirements. You also get information to help with promotion, pricing, sales, and marketing.

[6:53] What are some of your favorite questions to ask customers?

My favorite question to start with is “What does your typical day look like?” This serves as a bridge to make the customer start talking because they know their day very well. They say what is good and what is not very good about their day, and then you dive deeper and follow with other questions.

[7:43] Tell us about Context.

The context surrounds the company and products. First, what is the competition doing? Where are they positioning their product? What marketing and sales are they doing? Where are they selling it? What are they not doing? The things they’re not doing make good entry points for us. For instance, if there is a market segment they are not serving, we can grow our company in that direction.

The next part of context analysis is a PESTLE analysis, which looks at external factors—political, economic, social, technological, legal, and environmental—that is, all the trends impacting the business environment. There are so many new laws and environmental factors impacting our businesses that weren’t there 50 years ago.