Global Product Management Talk

Global Product Management Talk is pleased to bring you the next episode of... The Everyday Innovator with host Chad McAllister, PhD. The podcast is all about helping people involved in innovation and managing products become more successful, grow their careers, and STANDOUT from their peers. About the Episode: I’ve been looking forward to this discussion with Greg Satell since hearing he was working on a new book, titled Cascades: How to Create a Movement that Drives Transformational Change. Greg is an innovation author we first met back in episode 126, when he shared predictable patterns in different types of innovation. Now he is talking about how to create a movement around a product. A movement turns a valuable product into a super valuable sensation. Such products often appear to be overnight successes that come out of nowhere, but they are actually the result of the proper combination of actions that can lead to cascades (he’ll explain that) creating transformational change. There are many examples

Global Product Management Talk is pleased to bring you the next episode of... The Everyday Innovator with host Chad McAllister, PhD. The podcast is all about helping people involved in innovation and managing products become more successful, grow their careers, and STANDOUT from their peers. About the Episode: Many of the companies I have worked with this year want to make their product development and management capability more agile. They sometimes express their current process is too linear, rigid, and heavy as well as not providing the shorter time-to-market they want. Most often they are using something that is of a stage-gate nature, but being more agile doesn’t mean throwing away a stage-gate framework. However, it does mean adopting agile philosophy and processes. This is what our guest, Mike Cohn has been doing for more than 20 years — building high-performing software development teams and organizations through the use of agile and Scrum. He’s worked with startups and some of the largest organi

Global Product Management Talk is pleased to bring you the next episode of... The Everyday Innovator with host Chad McAllister, PhD. The podcast is all about helping people involved in innovation and managing products become more successful, grow their careers, and STANDOUT from their peers. About the Episode: A lot of new products are announced at trade shows and other events, such as CES for consumer electronics, International Builders Show for construction materials, and the National Association of Music Merchants for all things musical. For many product people, participating in their industry trade show each year is one of the most important things they do. The real pros who know how to launch products at trade shows are the ones who know how to compete for attention in noisy and crowded environments. It’s a real skill. They quickly capture interest and generate opportunities. Consequently, they have knowledge and experience Everyday Innovators should have as well. Which is why I spoke with one of

Global Product Management Talk is pleased to bring you the next episode of... The Everyday Innovator with host Chad McAllister, PhD. The podcast is all about helping people involved in innovation and managing products become more successful, grow their careers, and STANDOUT from their peers. About the Episode: Are your products not generating the revenue they should be just because you didn’t price them right? Pricing is a key concern of not only product managers and leaders but also the executives of organizations. Knowing the right price for a product is a challenge, especially if the product is new to the market. But, how to you determine the right price? If your pricing strategy resembles a dart board, there is a better way. You just need to know the steps and what data to collect to determine the right price. Our guest, CEO and co-founder of ProfitWell, Patrick Campbell, is a pricing pro and he shares the steps to determining the price of any product. Before founding ProfitWell, he served as an Ec

Global Product Management Talk is pleased to bring you the next episode of... The Everyday Innovator with host Chad McAllister, PhD. The podcast is all about helping people involved in innovation and managing products become more successful, grow their careers, and STANDOUT from their peers. About the Episode: This is a listener requested episode. Several Everyday Innovators have asked, “What are the qualities of a good product manager?” While many listeners are already good product managers, a little self-reflection from time to time on your strengths and how to be an even better product manager is valuable to your career as well as to those who you work with. One listener put this in a different light and asked who should not be a product manager. I thought that was a really insightful question. So, the following discussion addresses both topics:  qualities of a good product manager and who should not pursue a career in product management. To help us explore these topics, our guest is Marc Abraham, c

Global Product Management Talk is pleased to bring you the next episode of... The Everyday Innovator with host Chad McAllister, PhD. The podcast is all about helping people involved in innovation and managing products become more successful, grow their careers, and STANDOUT from their peers. About the Episode: I love hearing how companies improve their innovation capabilities and foster a culture of innovation. Anytime I hear such stories, I always find lessons for how other organizations can also improve their capability. In my experience, this best occurs by enabling the largest number of employees to participate in innovation activities. More employees thinking and acting like innovators results in more innovation for the organization. Cisco has had a program for the last four years that is built around an Innovation Challenge and Innovation Centers. It grew out of work with startups that expanded to Cisco employees. To learn about this, our guest is the Managing Director of the Cisco Innovation Cen

Global Product Management Talk is pleased to bring you the next episode of... The Everyday Innovator with host Chad McAllister, PhD. The podcast is all about helping people involved in innovation and managing products become more successful, grow their careers, and STANDOUT from their peers. About the Episode: Two spheres of capabilities are needed for product managers to be successful. One is competency in the processes, practices, and tools of product management. That is where I spend much of my time helping product managers and teams. The other sphere is competency in what is often called the soft skills and aligned with leadership. It is this sphere that many people find more difficult to master, especially those of us from technical backgrounds. But, without these competencies, you are severely limiting your potential. My passion is inspiring and equipping product managers and leaders. To that end, this is one of the most important discussions we have had yet on this podcast. At one point in the di

Global Product Management Talk is pleased to bring you the next episode of... The Everyday Innovator with host Chad McAllister, PhD. The podcast is all about helping people involved in innovation and managing products become more successful, grow their careers, and STANDOUT from their peers. About the Episode: Many companies have faced disruption. Of course, Uber and Airbnb are the poster children of disruption, but there are many more. Kodak was displaced by the digital camera. Blockbuster’s physical doors could not stay open in the face of Netflix’s virtual service. Borders Books failed in the wake of Amazon. Some companies have also managed to continue in the face of industry disruption, such as Best Buy and Barnes & Noble. What companies, both big and small, established and startup, can do to avoid disruption is the topic of this discussion. Our guest is Dr. Thales Teixeira, Associate Professor at Harvard Business School and research of digital disruption. He has a new book examining disruption

Global Product Management Talk is pleased to bring you the next episode of... The Everyday Innovator with host Chad McAllister, PhD. The podcast is all about helping people involved in innovation and managing products become more successful, grow their careers, and STANDOUT from their peers. About the Episode: Figuring out what your customer wants and needs from your product or service is the heart of product management. That is the beginning of how we create products that customers love. And, there are tools to help you do that. In this discussion, you will learn about a tool that has been available for a few years, but I rarely find product leaders and managers using it. It’s called the Value Proposition Canvas. We explored the concept of value proposition back in episode 123 with Alex Osterwalder. Now we talk with his co-founder Alan Smith. Together they started Strategyzer, which may be best known for their award-winning books Business Model Generation and Value Proposition Design and related traini

Global Product Management Talk is pleased to bring you the next episode of... The Everyday Innovator with host Chad McAllister, PhD. The podcast is all about helping people involved in innovation and managing products become more successful, grow their careers, and STANDOUT from their peers. About the Episode: Let’s face it, the smartest people don’t all work in your organization. The thought has been shared by many leaders, such as Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, and is originally attributed to Bill Joy, the co-founder of Sun Microsystems and UNIX contributor. He said, “The smartest people in the world don’t all work for us; most of them work for someone else.” To benefit from the creativity of smart people who are external to your organization, you need a way to find and attract them to contribute their brain power. There are time-tested ways to accomplish this, including traditional open innovation, incubators, and startups. Another approach is a partner program. Ford Motor Company has used this approach

Global Product Management Talk is pleased to bring you the next episode of... The Everyday Innovator with host Chad McAllister, PhD. The podcast is all about helping people involved in innovation and managing products become more successful, grow their careers, and STANDOUT from their peers. About the Episode: Recently I was helping the product leaders and managers in a large non-profit organization improve their performance. When we discussed the use of MVPs, minimal viable products, one question asked was if the MVP approach applies to services. The answer is yes, and our guest shares an example that led to a new recycling business. The MVP approach, or if you prefer, the MVE for minimal viable experiments, is a significant philosophical shift for some people. It means doing the minimum needed to learn what creates value for a customer–aligned with solving a problem or satisfying a job they want done, before creating a complete product. I think of it as a series of small, fast, and inexpensive experimen

Global Product Management Talk is pleased to bring you the next episode of... The Everyday Innovator with host Chad McAllister, PhD. The podcast is all about helping people involved in innovation and managing products become more successful, grow their careers, and STANDOUT from their peers. About the Episode: The principles of Lean-Driven Innovation lead to more value for customers and faster value capture (e.g., revenue) for organizations. The principles can be applied to any industry, but for our guest, they grew out of the R&D and product development practices at Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company. Our guest is Norbert Majerus, who was the Lean Champion in Innovation at Goodyear, where he worked for nearly 40 years before recently retiring. Now he enjoys sharing his experience with others. He captures much of the practices he learned in his new book, Lean-Driven Innovation.

Global Product Management Talk is pleased to bring you the next episode of... The Everyday Innovator with host Chad McAllister, PhD. The podcast is all about helping people involved in innovation and managing products become more successful, grow their careers, and STANDOUT from their peers. About the Episode: Many product managers and product marketers are using surveys incorrectly. We like surveys because they are relatively quick and inexpensive compared to other tools, such as customer interviews. While they can help us confirm what we think are the needs of customers and provide customer experience information, they are not something most customers look forward to participating in. My guest has a different experience. He creates surveys that not only have insanely high response rates but that actually create more loyal customers. Imagine that–surveys as a tool to make loyal customers. He is Matt Champagne, researcher, university professor, author, serial entrepreneur, and most importantly a survey

Global Product Management Talk is pleased to bring you the next episode of... The Everyday Innovator with host Chad McAllister, PhD. The podcast is all about helping people involved in innovation and managing products become more successful, grow their careers, and STANDOUT from their peers. About the Episode: How would you like to get more done this year? That begins by getting more done today and our guest has the four-part framework for making that happen. This is not just another time management approach, but what the creators and authors of the Google Design Sprint found to be the practices to get more done. Our guest is John Zeratsky co-author of Make Time: How to Focus on What Matters Every Day, He previously wrote the New York Times bestseller Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days, which describes the Google Design Spring process invented by Jake Knapp. By the way, Jake is the other co-author of the four-part Make Time framework we are about to discuss in detail.

Global Product Management Talk is pleased to bring you the next episode of... The Everyday Innovator with host Chad McAllister, PhD. The podcast is all about helping people involved in innovation and managing products become more successful, grow their careers, and STANDOUT from their peers. About the Episode: o you know which customers are most likely to stop using your product in the next month? Or, what actions your best customers take with your product when they start using it? With the right data, product managers not only know the answers to such questions, but they also know what actions to take to keep customers and a whole lot more. This is the area of predictive analytics and our guest is Brian Brinkmann, the VP of Products for a company involved in the revolution of business intelligence tools, leading to greater predictive capabilities. That company is Logi. Brian is the perfect person to learn predictive analytics from because he is also a classic product manager, recognizing the value of

Global Product Management Talk is pleased to bring you the next episode of... The Everyday Innovator with host Chad McAllister, PhD. The podcast is all about helping people involved in innovation and managing products become more successful, grow their careers, and STANDOUT from their peers. About the Episode:  If you have ever thought that a project you worked on had too much drama and unnecessary conflict — that the project should have been easier for everyone involved — then this episode is for you. We explore how to have less stressful projects by using Projectopia, our guest’s 8-step method project planning. With this method, he says you can crush your big projects; and you can do it without stress, and with clarity, direction, and efficiency. In addition to our discussion about how to use Projectopia, you can get a free guide… >>> Just click here for the free Projectopia Guide Our guest is Andy Rosic, currently the Innovation Product Manager at Home Depot, mentor to startups, and former founder

Global Product Management Talk is pleased to bring you the next episode of... The Everyday Innovator with host Chad McAllister, PhD. The podcast is all about helping people involved in innovation and managing products become more successful, grow their careers, and STANDOUT from their peers. About the Episode: Could it be that innovation is simple? I did say simple, not easy. The two words are often confused. A completed activity can be viewed as simple when the processes involved are known. No one that has been on innovation projects would say it was easy. The activities and processes that allow us to uncover a customer problem or invent a new technology, develop solutions, and ultimately launch products customers love are challenging, but they are not a mystery. We discuss them on this podcast frequently. Several frameworks exist to help make what is certainly not easy approachable and ultimately simple. Our guest shares a 9-part framework she used as a Fortune100 Chief Marketing and Innovation Officer

Global Product Management Talk is pleased to bring you the next episode of... The Everyday Innovator with host Chad McAllister, PhD. The podcast is all about helping people involved in innovation and managing products become more successful, grow their careers, and STANDOUT from their peers. About the Episode: Do you lead a product team or are you part of a team that should improve performance? I’ve been helping product teams and groups of product managers accomplish that — get higher performance. When I ask them why they need to improve performance, I typically hear one of four answers, with the most common being to create more of a customer focus. I also wanted to hear from product VPs and Directors that I haven’t worked with yet. So, I contacted several and received answers from 91 product leaders. You’ll find the results not only interesting but also valuable, as you will hear how other product professionals think about improving their teams and what is most important to your performance. For exampl

Global Product Management Talk is pleased to bring you the next episode of... The Everyday Innovator with host Chad McAllister, PhD. The podcast is all about helping people involved in innovation and managing products become more successful, grow their careers, and STANDOUT from their peers. About the Episode: You are in for a delightful and important discussion with our guest today. She was named a Top 100 Leadership Speaker for 2018 and is here to tell us how we can have a happier workplace. Is there anyone who doesn’t want that? Maybe you are the 1 in a million person who says my workplace is happy enough, it provides all the enjoyment and contentment I need. But, for the rest of us, I bet you would… Appreciate feeling significant in your organization,Knowing the work you do truly matters,Being in an environment that feels safe and one where you belong, andComing home energized, not worn out after a rough day. We spend more of our waking hours at work than anywhere else. Those hours should be great, ev

Global Product Management Talk is pleased to bring you the next episode of... The Everyday Innovator with host Chad McAllister, PhD. The podcast is all about helping people involved in innovation and managing products become more successful, grow their careers, and STANDOUT from their peers. About the Episode:  Do you participate in launch planning, or what may also be called go-to-market planning? In some organizations, product managers are directly involved, but not always, and that is a waste. You’ll hear why in this discussion, along with six elements addressed by a go-to-market strategy: Defining the target marketCreating a compelling reason for customers to buyDetermining the pricing strategyCrafting the positioningConducting competitive analysis, andPreparing to launch. Discussing go-to-market strategy is repeat guest, Mike Smart. He is a product management practitioner and founder of Egress Solutions, which helps companies implement product management best practices that build and launch successfu