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: One of the skills you need as a product master is customer and market research. We explored this earlier with Gerry Katz in episode 071. It was an episode several listeners really appreciated and I have invited Gerry back to share more of his expert experience with market research. Specifically, he discusses market research mistakes product managers too often make, including: Confusing qualitative with quantitative research.Talking to the wrong customers.Asking customers what they want.Not separating needs from solutions to needs.Translating customer vernacular into company-speak.Hearing only what you want to hear.

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: When I ask product managers why they got involved with product management and what they want from the role, a frequent answer is to have more influence. This also ranks as most important out of all the reasons for being a product manager. Does that ring true for you as well? Product managers with more influence are able to accomplish more — creating better products for customers that they value. Product managers with less influence may be treated like gophers — asked to go do this or go do that. Such product managers are more reactive than proactive. If you are like me, there is little that sounds fun or rewarding about that. Indeed, we need influence. To help us get it, I invited Tom Henschel bac

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: Back in episode 110 we learned about FirstBuild, the innovation lab of GE Appliance. It allows them to test ideas and solve problems that would be considered too small or risky by GE Appliance. They have built a platform that is fueled by an open community of consumers and problem solvers. What would happen if that capability was used by other companies to tackle any type of product concept? That is what Taylor Dawson is discovering. When I talked with him in episode 110 he was the Product Evangelist for First Build. Now he is the CEO of Giddy, who is providing a First Build capability to any large company. That is like being able to create a successful innovation lab overnight without actually bu

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: Fundamentally, product managers should be driving success for their organization. We do that by providing customers value. The source of that value may be, and perhaps should be, closer to our core capabilities than is often thought. The toy company LEGO found this to be true, only after being on the brink of bankruptcy. Other companies have also discovered this principle, which is something my guest calls innovating near the core. My guest this week, David Robertson, explored this in a book-long case study of LEGO, called Brick by Brick:  How LEGO Rewrote the Rules of Innovation and Conquered the Global Toy Industry. In his recent book, The Power of Little Ideas: A Low-Risk, High-Reward Approach t

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: No one and no organization has a perfect record when it comes to releasing new products into the market. Failures are frequent — around 40% or so depending on the industry — and they happen at small companies, big companies, and experienced companies, including Pepsi. In this episode, you’ll learn a simple and profound concept that every product manager and product marketer must understand. And, this is an easy one to get wrong. Even Pepsi got this wrong when they created a new product called Crystal Pepsi. The simple part of the concept — don’t confuse your customer. The profound part — when introducing something new or making a change, give your customer a reason. My guest to explain this conc

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:  Every week I’m involved in virtual meetings and the same is true for many Everyday Innovators. If it’s not yet true for you, virtual meetings are almost certainly in your future as more teams become virtual. Facilitating virtual meetings and making them productive takes specific skills that product managers should know. With these skills, you can run virtual meetings that don’t waste people’s time and that build trust and cohesion in the team. To learn the right skills, I have the perfect guest as his company is all about facilitating virtual meetings. He joins us to share his “Six How’s of Great Meetings.” His name is Dan Hoffman and he is founder and CEO of Circles, an online service that provi

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:  In this episode you’ll learn about some of the big ideas in product management to help you make the move to product master, specifically: The difference between building the product right vs. building the right product,Challenges of working with development teams,How to assemble a roadmap,Release planning, andThe benefits of first using divergent thinking followed by convergent thinking. My guest for addressing those topics is Suzanne Abate, a seasoned product coach who has developed hundreds of digital products for clients and helped dozens of startups go from idea to execution. She is the Co-Founder of The Development Factory, an LA-based product consultancy, and Chief Product Officer of 100 Prod

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: Several listeners have asked about medical device products and I searched for someone with deep experience in this area. I realize most of us are not involved with medical devices, but there is much any product manager can learn from the upcoming discussion. This ability to learn from product managers in different industries is one of the things I most enjoy about this podcast. We have a lot in common regardless of the industry we work in. The topic of this episode is pricing. It is a frequently asked about topic and I have a great guest to help us understand the components of a pricing strategy and how to price a product. My guest is Mike Lawless, who has over 25 years of experience in medical dev

The topic of this episode is pricing. It is a frequently asked about topic. Determing the proper price for a product  impacts profit potential and sales volume expectations. I have a great guest to help us understand the components of a pricing strategy and how to price a product. He is Tim Smith, author of five books on pricing, Adjunct Professor of Marketing and Economics at DePaul University, and founder of Wiglaf Pricing.

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 few months ago I was contacted by a product manager, Areo Wong, who works in Hong Kong. He described himself as a “newbie” with about one-year of experience. He has been struggling to learn what the role of product manager was really about. After trying a few different approaches to learning more, he took a very creative path. He decided to interview 30 expert product managers and create a virtual summit of the insights shared on the interviews. This would help him rapidly learn and provide an opportunity for other younger product managers to do the same. I thought it was a great idea since my work is all about helping product managers know what they really need to know. So, I eagerly accepted his

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 discussion coming up is about the state of 3D printing for prototyping and additive manufacturing. 3D printing is evolving quickly with the capability to print in a wide variety of materials. Also, post-processing capabilities, such as metal-plating plastic printed parts, are creating new opportunities for ergonomically correct parts. 3D printing provides significant efficiencies and competitive advantages. I discussed the state of 3D printing and additive manufacturing with industry veteran John Bailotti. His background couples engineering, manufacturing, financial research, marketing, business development, and leadership, providing a valuable perspective in helping companies adopt additive ma

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 may just be the most important interview yet. While it does not directly deal with product management concepts, it does deal with success concepts. The upcoming discussion is about a book The Muse called the number-one best career book available. The book is Insight: Why We’re Not as Self-Aware as We Think, and How Seeing Ourselves Clearly Helps Us Succeed at Work and in Life. I discussed the key concepts of being more self-aware with Insight author, Dr. Tasha Eurich. Tasha is an organizational psychologist, researcher, and New York Times best-selling author. She has helped thousands of leaders and teams improve their effectiveness through greater self-awareness. In the interview she shares tw

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 organizations can improve their product performance and overall performance is as important to product managers as it is to senior leaders. Making improvements has become more challenging as the business environment for most organizations is changing more quickly and contains greater uncertainty than in the past. Organizations that better respond to these changes can create a competitive advantage and one way to accomplish that is through Strategic Agility. Dan Montgomery is a practitioner of Strategic Agility and shares with us simple and practical tools in this interview. He is also the co-author of The Institute Way: Simplify Strategic Planning and Management with the Balanced Scorecard. He

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 interview should be a fan favorite as many people have emailed me asking what executives want from product managers. My short answer is that executives and senior leaders want product managers to be thinking and acting more strategically towards the objectives of the organization. However, there are a lot of specifics to discuss, and this interview does that. My guest structures the discussion around three stages of organizational growth, which he calls the early stage, adolescent, and well-established. What executives need from product managers differs with each stage. Sharing these insights with us is Scott Propp, a former Fortune 100 executive and all around product guy. Today he serves or

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 state of innovation in organizations is unsettling. Executives overwhelmingly point to innovation as the growth engine for their organizations yet actual innovation performance is underwhelming. There are several factors contributing to the issue and one of them is the way innovation is led. The reality is that most organizational leaders don’t really understand innovation or know how to lead it. Well, that is about to change with this interview. The Center for Creative Leadership conducts original research, with findings to help leaders be more effective. New research conducted by Mike Mitchell found that leading innovation requires a different approach to leadership. This research explains w

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 it when listeners suggest topics to explore on this podcast. One of those is win-loss analysis. This traditionally is considered a sales tool to understand why a customer chose or rejected a product. However, savvy product management groups recognize it as vital analysis for improving products and the customer experience. To explore the topic, I talked with Mike Smart who teaches organizations to conduct win-loss analysis from a product management perspective and also manages the entire analysis for organizations. He is a product management practitioner and founder of Egress Solutions, which helps companies implement product management best practices that build and launch successful products.

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: Product management is about creating value for customers through the capabilities a product or service provides. That extends beyond actual features and encompasses tangible and intangible dimensions of value. Typically, when creating a new product, we start with a core set of features. Early on this may be a minimum viable product — which I rather think of as the minimum valuable product — a product that provides an acceptable amount of value that catches customers’ attention. Over time we add more capabilities to create more value, but that is still not what we are striving for. We need to create a whole product — adding other elements to the customer experience that solves a complete problem and 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: Design is increasingly an aspect of product management, not just product teams. More of us are familiar with user experience and its impact on design, but where does design really begin? Every true user experience expert I have talked with about this has the same answer and that’s with the user of the product or the person with the problem that we wish to solve with a product. How we actually get insights from users can be the difference between product success and failure. To explore the right way to get insights, I talked with Brian Baker at the First User Group, which is a strategic innovation firm providing business strategy and cutting-edge product design in digital, consumer electronics, and 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: A competency on the path from product manager to product master is leadership. As product managers and innovators, we rarely have any actual authority. For example, we can’t fire and hire employees. What product managers do have is influence, and it is this competency that allows you to motivate others to support your ideas and plan. At the core of leadership is influence. This interview explores how you develop influence and become a leader. My guest is Ken Lane, principal coach at Summit Catalyst, where he provides senior executive coaching and helps organizations with strategy development and implementation, change management, and executive team development.

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: Product managers need to think more strategically to expand their success. This is what executive teams want from their product managers, and this interview with my guest is a great case study for thinking strategically and reshaping an entire organization. What if you could create a new product that significantly increased the visibility of your brand – making it top of mind for your ideal customer – resulting in new sales and increased brand equity while at the same time creating a rich market research platform? Oh, and if that isn’t already enough, do real good in the process – transforming your organization’s brand from traditional corporate America to one of the good guys – a company doing gen