Global Product Management Talk

Global Product Management Talk is pleased to bring you episode 041 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 Our Guest: Mark Zeh was already developing products using a methodology that was very similar to what IDEO was doing when he joined them. The approach has since been coined Design Thinking. He views the use of storytelling coupled with prototyping as the keys that make Design Thinking work so well. Mark started his design career in the US creating custom mountain bike frames in Minneapolis that carried his name. He worked for product design giant IDEO in the US and helped to lead the office in Germany. He also consulted independently to numerous companies, applying Design Thinking, and is now at Bose, the audio technology powerhouse. In addition, he leads the Entrepreneurship program at the Munich Business School. I

Global Product Management Talk is pleased to bring you episode 040 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 this Interview:  Innovation is a part of LEGO’s DNA, but this has not always been the case. In the 90s, the company’s sales were declining. They hired innovation consultant after innovation consultant, trying practices that worked for others but were not a good fit for them. In 2003 the company lost $300 million dollars. Then a few things changed, with a focus on creating “enhanced play” experiences. Today, 60% of their annual revenue comes from new products – innovation is at the core of their successful business.  Part of their turnaround is because of how they leveraged their loyal fans, creating a community that promotes the brand and extends what you can do with LEGOs. When I asked LEGO who I could interview to

Global Product Management Talk is pleased to bring you episode 039 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. Our Guest: Patents, trademarks, and copyrights make my head spin. But, any good product manager or innovator needs to consider the intellectual property issues when developing a product. Consequently, I asked patent attorney Dan Brean of the Webb Law Firm in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to help all of us Everyday Innovators navigate the IP issues with new product development. Dan is an experienced patent litigator and prosecutor, primarily working with mechanical, electrical, and software technologies, so he brings a good mix of hardware and software IP experience. He also teaches at the University of Pittsburgh school of law. Of the many topics covered, one question asked is... What are the forms of IP protection and how do

Global Product Management Talk is pleased to bring you episode 038 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. Our Guest:  I met Michael Graber at Innovation Excellence, the online home of the global innovation community, where we both contribute innovation insights regularly. Truth be told, I was giving in to my vanity and checking out the top-20 posts for the month. My record is three posts in the top-20 in one month. For the month I was checking, Michael's name took the spotlight, and of course, I immediately thought he would be a great person to interview. When I did, I was not disappointed. Michael has more than twenty years of experience leading marketing and innovation efforts. As an expert in marketing and user interface, he has become an accomplished brand strategist. And, this is what really made me curious to talk with hi

Global Product Management Talk is pleased to bring you episode 037 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. Our Guest: Luke Hohmann was recommended by the VP of Global Innovation of the RELX Group, Jeff Honious, who was my guest in episode 28. Consequently, I knew I had to interview Luke to learn about his tools for innovators. Luke is the founder and CEO of The Innovation Games, which is now known as Conteneo. His past experiences include computer scientist, engineer, and product manager. Luke is serious about the smart application of games to optimize decision making in innovation, product development, and market research, and numerous companies use his tools. He is also the author of “Innovation Games: Creating Breakthrough Products Through Collaborative Play.” My favorite line from his profile is: “Luke’s an old school Silico

Global Product Management Talk is pleased to bring you episode 036 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. Our Guest: Jeremy Dillingham has a long list of skills and experiences as a seasoned product manager, including leading teams, roadmap planning, portfolio management, Lean Startup, Customer Discovery, Agile Development, and SaaS architectures. He is a mentor at Techstars, an accelerator for technology startups. He currently serves as a Senior VP at Return Path, a company that helps organizations promote and protect their brands. Some favorite product management tools: Discovery – the process of talking with customers and validating what you are learning about the problems and needs. This involves writing a script of interview questions, prioritizing the questions, talking with customers to gain responses, and analyzing the

Global Product Management Talk is pleased to bring you episode 035 of... The Everyday Innovator with host Chad McAllister, PhD. The podcast is all about helping people involved in developing and managing products become more successful, grow their careers, and STANDOUT from their peers. Our Guest: Professional associations provide value to career development. The first professional association I was involved in was the Project Management Institute, and I eventually became certified as a Project Manager Professional (PMP) because I recognized its value in helping me improve my project management capabilities while also helping me to stand out with future employers. Another association I have valued, as well as contributed to, is specific to product managers, marketing managers, and innovators. It is AIPMM, The Association of International Product Marketing and Management. I interviewed the president, Therese Padilla, to learn more about this important organization.

Global Product Management Talk is pleased to bring you episode 034 of... The Everyday Innovator with host Chad McAllister, PhD. The podcast is all about helping people involved in developing and managing products become more successful, grow their careers, and STANDOUT from their peers. Our Guest: Michal Herzenstein, who contributed to writing “Optimal Design for Radically New Products” in the PDMA Essentials book titled “Design and Design Thinking”. Michal is an associate professor of marketing at the University of Delaware and she earned her PhD in marketing from the University of Rochester.   Highlights from the discussion include… Product innovation teams that wish to create radically new products can use six processes to help them. Large companies are better off implementing these 6 process in ascending order and focus on communicating the goal of achieving a breakthrough product to the innovating team.  Communicate the Challenge Goal Toward Radically New Products Shift Time Frames to Future and Pa

Global Product Management Talk is pleased to bring you episode 033 of... The Everyday Innovator with host Chad McAllister, PhD. The podcast is all about helping people involved in developing and managing products become more successful, grow their careers, and STANDOUT from their peers. Our Guest: Tim Bates is a product creator, founder, and CEO and more recently, an interim executive for hire serving in innovation, product and senior leadership roles. Another interesting thing about Tim is that he lives in Boulder, Colorado, which is an entrepreneur and startup utopia. It is frequently recognized as one of the best places to found a startup, even rivaling San Francisco with a higher per capita percentage of computer scientists and PhDs. Highlights from the discussion include… One big difference between a startup and an enterprise is in the production of a product. Startups are more experimental while enterprises are more finance focused. Enterprises are less likely to engage in Minimum Viable Products (M

Global Product Management Talk is pleased to bring you episode 032 of... The Everyday Innovator with host Chad McAllister, PhD. The podcast is all about helping people involved in developing and managing products become more successful, grow their careers, and STANDOUT from their peers. Our Guest: Nathan Rosenberg is the person who executives turn to for advice. He has worked with more than 100 of the 1000 largest companies in the world and has been founder or CEO of 5 companies. As an example of his experience, he provided innovation consulting that led a well-known consumer goods company to add $200M of revenue in year 1 of acting on his advice. He is co-authoring a chapter in PDMA’s “Design and Design Thinking” book titled “Leading for a Corporate Culture of Design Thinking.” Nathan describes 4 stages of transforming corporate culture to enable design thinking: Stage 1: Reveal the already existing culture in your organization and analyze it thoroughly.Stage 2: Unhook from the existing culture. The com

Global Product Management Talk is pleased to bring you episode 031 of... The Everyday Innovator with host Chad McAllister, PhD. The podcast is all about helping people involved in developing and managing products become more successful, grow their careers, and STANDOUT from their peers. Our Guest: I am bringing back my guest from episode 17, which was about creating the ProdBOK – The Guide to the Product Management and Marketing Body of Knowledge and how Greg Geracie led that effort. I also shared on that episode that he is a co-author of the annual Study of Product Team Performance and the 2015 report is now available. Greg joined me to share the key findings from the study and help all of us better understand team performance and changes that could improve performance of product teams. Highlights from the discussion include… 4 new factors were added in this year’s study that are associated with product team  performance. Strategic decision-making — product teams that develop their capacity for strategi

Global Product Management Talk is pleased to bring you episode 030 of... The Everyday Innovator with host Chad McAllister, PhD. The podcast is all about helping people involved in developing and managing products become more successful, grow their careers, and STANDOUT from their peers. Our Guest: Nir Eyal has been a startup co-founder, a CEO, and now helps product teams build habit-forming products. He is also the author of the book “Hooked,” which tells you how to create products that capture the attention of consumers and create engagement. Highlights from the discussion include… The “Hooked” model applies best to products that require repeat engagement. This is clearly appropriate for many software applications (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, Google) but can also be incorporated in the service aspects of other products.The 4-step hook model is: Trigger: a cue to action  that tells the user what to do next (e.g., “You got to see this video!”). A trigger leads to an action.Action: the simplest behavior done

Global Product Management Talk is pleased to bring you episode 029 of... The Everyday Innovator with host Chad McAllister, PhD. The podcast is all about helping people involved in developing and managing products become more successful, grow their careers, and STANDOUT from their peers. Our Guest: Steve Pierz is a serial innovator at Caterpillar. A serial innovator is often on the cutting-edge if not the bleeding-edge, in mature organizations. They are the problem-solvers that substantially contribute to their company’s financial value. Highlights from the discussion include… Innovation is looking at things differently and questioning traditional wisdom.Innovators can be irritating to experts in the organization who do not welcome having the way things work being questioned.Serial innovators’ reputations for discarding old ideas and promoting new ideas can create uncomfortable first meetings. Steve often receives an “Oh, I have heard about you” when meeting people in the organization for the first time.In

Global Product Management Talk is pleased to bring you episode 028 of... The Everyday Innovator with host Chad McAllister, PhD. The podcast is all about helping people involved in developing and managing products become more successful, grow their careers, and STANDOUT from their peers. Our Guest: Jeff Honious is the VP of Innovation at RELX Group, which you may know as Reed Elsevier, a multi-billion dollar international publishing and information company. To provide some context for this, the company bio shares that it helps scientists make new discoveries, lawyers win cases, doctors save lives and executives forge relationships with their clients. Jeff’s background is in technology and web-based product development. Previous to his innovation role he also contributed to his company adopting agile development practices. Jeff's innovation team has two primary responsibilities: (1) build innovation capability across the business by helping groups set up their innovation process, provide training, and use t

Global Product Management Talk is pleased to bring you episode 026 of... The Everyday Innovator with host Chad McAllister, PhD. The podcast is all about helping people involved in developing and managing products become more successful, grow their careers, and STANDOUT from their peers. Our Guest:  I have the pleasure of interviewing people in all types of roles that can help product managers, developers and innovators. And today I get to bring you a discussion with the Chairman of the Product Development & Management Association (PDMA), Charlie Noble. I’ve been wanting to do this interview because PDMA is the professional association that first opened my eyes to the discipline of product management. Charlie is also an award-winning professor at the University of Tennessee where he teaches design, innovation, and new product development. He has helped many organizations with product development and marketing issues as well as contributing to research in these areas. How do you create meaningful prod

Global Product Management Talk is pleased to bring you episode 026 of... The Everyday Innovator with host Chad McAllister, PhD. The podcast is all about helping people involved in developing and managing products become more successful, grow their careers, and STANDOUT from their peers. Our Guest: If you have listened to other episodes of this podcast, you likely have heard me say that the challenges with product management and creating products customers love is not actually development – while it’s not easy, we generally know how to get a product developed. The real challenge is knowing what product to develop. This is the realm of designing for the user, and specifically, the user experience. Consequently, I’m pleased to interview Mark Capper, an expert in designing user experiences.  Mark has over 20 years of experience refining his craft of user-centered product development and innovation across the spectrum of organizations from startups to several Fortune 100 companies, including PepsiCo, Johnson &a

Global Product Management Talk is pleased to bring you episode 025 of... The Everyday Innovator with host Chad McAllister, PhD. The podcast is all about helping people involved in developing and managing products become more successful, grow their careers, and STANDOUT from their peers. Our Guest: This episode is different from others and well worth listening to.  It is the story about the class I helped to organize for eight students who were 9-12 years of age. As I normally teach university graduate courses, this was an entirely new realm for me. We called the class FIL – Future Innovation Leaders. The premise for the class was seeing the connection between the digital world and the physical world. For example, creating a computer program that controlled the actions of a robot, or making a 3D model in software and being able to touch the model and hand it to friends after 3D printing it. We met for 3 hours once a week for eight weeks. The class was constructed around three piece: robotics, 3D design and

Global Product Management Talk is pleased to bring you episode 024 of... The Everyday Innovator with host Chad McAllister, PhD. The podcast is all about helping people involved in developing and managing products become more successful, grow their careers, and STANDOUT from their peers. Our Guest: If you are involved in product innovation, you likely already know about the website Innovation Excellence, home of the global innovation community that provides connection and conversation among its nearly 200,000 visitors each month. The site was co-founded by my guest, Braden Kelley. Braden is also a speaker and executive trainer as well as an author with a growing list of innovation publications. Highlights from the discussion include... the 5 keys to developing an innovation culture: Learn the basics of culture change, such as the 8-step Kotter change model or the Leading Change Formula. Build a common language of innovation. Define what innovation means for the organization. Create a connected organization

Global Product Management Talk is pleased to bring you episode 023 of... The Everyday Innovator with host Chad McAllister, PhD. The podcast is all about helping people involved in developing and managing products become more successful, grow their careers, and STANDOUT from their peers. Our Guest: Sam Froggatte is a golf gadget guru! He is the CEO of EyeLine Golf, a company that specializes in creating and selling training aids for anyone to improve their golf play. Their training products are used by weekend leisure golfers as well as hundreds of PGA players. Sam’s route to becoming a product innovator in the golf industry started in sales and marketing at IBM and then as an independent sales rep for golf equipment. Highlights from the discussion include... 3 principles Sam uses to create successful products: Fundamentally sound – the product has to do the right things, built on sound principles and not faulty assumptions.Intuitive – products must be simple to use and require little to no training to us

Global Product Management Talk is pleased to bring you episode 022 of... The Everyday Innovator with host Chad McAllister, PhD. The podcast is all about helping people involved in developing and managing products become more successful, grow their careers, and STANDOUT from their peers. Our Guests: I have not one, but two guests to discuss product innovation for this episode. The first is Kimberly Johnson, who I met through the Global PMI Innovation Practice Area. I learned that Kim had recently co-authored a chapter for an upcoming book, and the chapter is titled “Triggering Innovation Through Organizational Development.” Her co-author is my second guest, AB Reynolds. Highlights from the discussion include: The concepts are synthesized from a powerhouse of interviews with 3M innovators, organized around 3 themes that foster organizational innovation: Conditions must exist to allow individuals and teams to create innovative products.Leaders must spot, support, and invest in valuable innovations.As the pr