Product Mastery Now for Product Managers, Leaders, and Innovators 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,

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...

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...

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...

Product management insights from medical innovations

Today we are talking about product management and innovation of medical products.  Throughout my career, I’ve often found the best insights for improving my product work by learning from other industries, so even if you are not involved in medical products, you’ll be able to apply the practices you are about to hear. You’ll learn where insights for new or improved products come from and the pitfalls to avoid in getting products launched.

We are learning with Ron Richard, a seasoned expert specializing in medical devices, medical diagnostics, and the life sciences. He has over 35 years of experience in the Medical Industry, has launched over 40 products, and has 17 patents under his belt. He is also the author of the book Someday is TODAY, which describes how to move from idea to launched product.

Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers

[2:17] How did you get your start in developing medical products?

I started through my experience as a respiratory therapist. I worked in intensive care where patients are often on a ventilator and intubated. It’s frustrating to try to communicate with patients because they can’t talk. The first product I invented was a communication board that has simple phrases on it that a patient can point to. I didn’t have any idea how to develop a product, but I saw a problem and came up with a solution.

I’m also a paramedic, and I worked on an ambulance. Back in the day, when you pick someone up and put them on oxygen, the oxygen cylinder goes right between their legs on the gurney as they’re transported to the ambulance. It was not very comfortable or safe. I bought some PVC tubing and straps and made my own oxygen cylinder holder. That got sold to the company that makes gurneys, and it’s still in use today.

[5:38] What skills are involved in discovering insights that lead to products?

Be open-minded. Be attentive to what’s going on in your surroundings. Live in the moment. When I’m dealing with critical issues with patients, I could get distracted, but I’ve had the ability to stay in the moment and not only take care of the patient but also work with the clinical team and observe what products they’re using.

[7:01] What role do patients play in getting insights for new products?

The first step is to come up with a platform or base idea. The next step is to interview patients and talk in general terms through a PowerPoint or show them a prototype and get their feedback.

Many years ago, when people started using CPAP, which is a way to keep your airway open through a mask attached to a machine by a hose, the masks were very clunky and hard to put on. You had to really tighten them up, and it would make a crease on your nose and a red welt around your face. I saw those problems right away with patients. Through my experience at ResMed, we developed some of the most world-class, very comfortable masks you could ever imagine. That really advanced the whole field of sleep apnea, because if the mask is not comfortable, the patient isn’t going to wear it.

[9:54] How do you make prototypes?

I’ve used all kinds of different materials: foam, cardboard, plastics. Now 3D printers are fantastic. You can make all different sizes and shapes of things as long as you’ve got a decent CAD drawing.

My book is focused on medical stuff, but I’m working on a project now using the same framework in my book to develop a new rain gauge. We’re using 3D-printing rapid prototyping.

[11:16] How does your innovation process apply to many different fields?

Early in my product development career, I attended a week-long workshop called the House of Quality that was put on by Ford and Toyota. I noticed the Ford and Toyota engineers had different approaches to developi...

The Discover, Analyze, Create, Develop Design Thinking Framework for product managers

You’ve heard about Design Thinking or even tried it. It is a simple-to-understand tool for solving problems, developing strategy, and most commonly for us product professionals, for developing a new product or service. And while it is simple to understand, that doesn’t mean it is easy to apply. I’ve seen Design Thinking mistakes, and I’ve made my own as well, which limit the results this powerful tool can provide. When you apply Design Thinking, wouldn’t you like to know you are getting the most from it?

That is why Tom Granzow is with us. He has applied Design Thinking to hundreds of projects and also trained over 1200 people to use it properly. Tom has held senior innovation roles with an emphasis on medical devices and equipment and now shares his 35 years of experience and knowledge with others as the founder of Granzow Design Strategies.

Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers

[2:23] Why is Design Thinking one of your primary tools?

I think of Design Thinking as a framework and set of tools for problem solving. There are four key things that Design Thinking helps me accomplish:



* Getting closer to the customer

* Turning insights from customer research into action

* Driving collaboration

* Experimenting and iterating



Design Thinking is a common framework that helps me communicate with other folks and get everybody on the same page.

[5:09] Tell us about the phases of the Design Thinking framework: Discover, Analyze, Create, Develop.

I modified these phases from Vijay Kumar’s model in 101 Design Methods.

1. Discover

a. Frame: Frame out the customer problem and what you’re trying to accomplish for your business.

b. Research: Build empathy. Understand customer problems.

2. Analyze

a. Facts: What did customers say and do?

b. Interpret: What did the customer research mean?

c. Synthesize: Identify patterns and turn them into something actionable for the team like design principles, journey maps, and personas.

3. Create

a. Brainstorm: Use a structured method, such as:



* Yes, and. Don’t say “no.” Say “yes, and” to keep the idea going.

* Creative matrix: Use this to break a big problem down into bite-sized chunks you can try to solve. Identify key problems on the horizontal axis and potential stimuli like materials and processes on the vertical axis. Brainstorm within each of those squares.



b. Visualize: Build a sketch, rendering, or prototype.

c. Combine idea fragments: Instead of trying to pick out idea fragments, combine them into bigger concepts.

4. Develop

a. Test and refine: Put your ideas in front of customers, get feedback, and iterate.

b. Repeat: Cycle through testing and refining many times.

[14:18] What do people typically get right when applying Design Thinking?

Companies that I have worked with really want to understand the customer. They don’t always have the right tools, and that’s what I’ve been able to help with.

People understand the Design Thinking framework. I try not to call it a process, since teams already have their processes and don’t want new ones. Once people go through the training, they understand the framework and tools and can apply them.

I’ve been very happy about the participation I’ve gotten. As long as I can explain what we’re trying to do, the engagement is amazing.

Design Thinking helps with collaboration. It’s fun and engaging. People like doing the Design Thinking activities.

[17:44] What do people tend to get wrong when applying Design Thinking?

Some people think Design Thinking is supposed to be a really structured and linear process.