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: Being a good product manager requires a diverse set of skills, including communicating, influencing, design, technology, product process, and business acumen. New product managers and not-so new product managers have lots of opportunities to make mistakes. When you can, it is better to learn from the mistakes of others. That is why I invited Cole Mercer to join us and discuss common mistakes and how to avoid them. Cole has a very popular course on Udemy for people wanting to get into product management or who are brand new to it. He also is creating training on LinkedIn Learning for new product managers. I also want to tell you about the fastest growing conference for software product management. It is coming up soon, Oct 2-3, 2018 and you still have time to register. It’s called INDUSTRY and they have several product experts (many you will know from listening to this podcast) lined up to share their experience. Everyday Innovators can register for the conference for 30% off. Just use the code EverydayInnovator when you register. Find all the details at www.INDUSTRYconference.com. Now to the discussion for avoiding product management mistakes.

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: Creating products customers love. If you are like most product managers and innovators, that is your motivation to do great work — the work of product management. It is our common thread and a distinguishing characteristic of Everyday Innovators. Every day we are looking for problems we can solve in ways that create more value for customers. That means we have to understand customers’ problems, what they want to accomplish, what they want to avoid, and how they want to feel. When we are doing our job really well, we know our customers better than they know themselves. Part of that job is asking customers questions – the right questions that help us discover information that ultimately leads to products they will love. This is an area Rachel Wynn knows a good deal about. She is a product manager and communication expert I met at Rocky Mountain ProductCamp in Denver, Colorado. She joins us to share her guidelines for asking great questions, which are organized into a framework of three areas, which she calls: Grace,Bias, andPivot.

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:  Creating products customers love feels like juggling a whole lot of balls at one time. It can be chaotic. It’s also a good bet that people on your product team, and most certainly in your organization outside the core team, have different understandings of what the product is about. It’s a real challenge to keep everyone on the same page. The tool that brings order to the chaos is vision. The product vision is like the guiding northern light for the product team, keeping everyone moving in the same direction. It is the responsibility of the product manager to create and share the product vision. Yet, it is not easily done. Very few great product vision examples exist. Thankfully for us, my guest knows how to create product vision and has done so many times. He is Jon Hensley, CEO of Emerge Interactive. Jon’s expertise is from driving innovation through design thinking from his work designing hundreds of digital experiences with organizations in a variety of industries.

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 be high achievers and many are. They are the driving force that discover unmet needs customers have, creating value through their product work. The work is both demanding and fulfilling. To be a high achiever, you can learn from those who already are. High achievers have some things in common. Knowing how they think and what they do can help you. My guest, Arthur Carmazzi, wrote the book on high achievers, titled The Six Dimensions of a Top Achiever. Arthur is the founder of Directive Communication Psychology and is ranked among the top-10 leadership thought leaders by Global Gurus. In our discussion he shares six dimensions of top achievers: Failure-proofDisciplineMotivationPersuasionVisibilityFinances

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:  UX is a hot topic and for good reason. The right UX skills on a product team can make the product more successful. The wrong skills waste money and time. Many product managers and leaders make mistakes when adding UX roles to their product teams — but you won’t be one of them because of this discussion. My guest shares the common mistakes and how to avoid them. He organizes UX skills into three categories: research, interaction design, visual design. Using the right skill at the right time during the development of the product is important. Otherwise, you’ll encounter the square peg in the round hole problem and no one is happy with that. My guest has been a product manager and is a UX specialist with more than 15 years of experience. He has built UX teams from scratch and now helps organizations build and manage successful teams. His name is Sam Horodezky.

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: Learning how to best work with a product team or organization requires taking the right action and avoiding mistakes. Your opportunities to a make a good first impression are limited, so you need to make the most of them. Most product managers will work with a new team from time to time and many will change organizations. It turns out the tips for managing these transitions also apply to your daily work – tips to help you be a better product manager. To explore transitioning well, Gavin Feuer joins us. He is now a senior product manager for T-Mobile, recently making the transition from Amazon. Gavin brings a strong entrepreneurial mindset to the role of product manager, which you’ll hear in the interview. His Amazon colleagues shared that his superpower is the ability to “think big.” He’s happy to help people who have a really big idea think more deeply about it. He also is a volunteer mentor to undergraduate students at the University of Washington, always willing to take on the right motivated mentee that is new to product management.

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: To be a great product manager, do you also need to be a great actor? No, but there are lessons from acting that will make you a better product manager. While I have no acting experience, not even school plays, I have talked with several actors who became business coaches. It was not an obvious career path until I learned from each of them how their acting skills transferred to skills others need off the stage. They apply practices from acting to help business professionals and leaders. So, when I saw an article in Mind the Product titled, “Oh the Drama! What Product Managers can Learn From Actors,” I eagerly read it. The author, Alison Kemp, shared seven areas where acting techniques can help product managers, which she called: Thinking on Your FeetHigh-Performance TeamsCreative Thinking and InnovationActive ListeningPausingStorytelling, andIdentity I asked Alison to join us to discuss some of these techniques. It proved to be a fun and insightful discussion with important tips for product managers and innovators. Alison is the founder of Switchvision, which helps clients become more effective communicators, presenters, and interviewers by applying techniques from business, theatre, and psychology.

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: We have a great topic for this discussion, addressing a question several Everyday Innovators have asked before, which is… “How do I get my manager to pay for product management training?” My guest will share the right and the wrong ways to get your manager and organization to support your professional development. He is Matt Burns, an HR executive and winner of Canada’s Most Innovative Use of HR Technology award.

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: What products do you use that you love? Think of a product that you are glad to tell other people about. You share how it helps you solve a problem or get a task down. Or, maybe how the product makes you feel. It might be your phone, a perfectly balanced and beautifully designed pen, a pocket knife that makes you feel just a little more self-reliant, or, in my case, the Paragon induction cooktop that allows me to make perfect omelets my wife and kids rave about. Great products are ones that we love. They create emotions in us that go beyond satisfaction, extending to true delight. Creating products that customers love is what product management is about, and also just happens to be the central theme for all of you who are Everyday Innovators. It is why this podcast exists and is the focus of this episode. I explore the topic with Todd Olson, co-founder of Pendo, a capability for creating product experiences customers can’t live without. Before starting Pendo, Todd was VP Products at Rally Software and has been a co-founder for two other companies. He was also recently announced as an EY Entrepreneur Of The Year finalist. Todd knows a lot about developing software, founding and building companies, and creating products customers love.

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 had to explain what you do as a product manager to people you work with, you are in good company. Most product managers find this necessary. Further, the role means different things in different organizations. The leaders of your organization may have a perspective of the role that is not really accurate, or as I have seen more often, they don’t understand the leverage the role provides them. In this discussion, we explore what organizational leaders need to understand about the role of product manager. But, we don’t stop there as product managers also need to have a clear understanding of the needs of the organization. This discussion will help you better talk to the leaders of your company about your role and to understand your very important role more deeply. To discuss the topic, I invited Kirsten Butzow to join us. She is a product veteran, serving as VP Product Management at Person and Blackboard and has held other product roles. Now she is a product coach for Pragmatic Marketing.