Product Innovation Series with Aram Melkoumov

Customer feedback is no trivial matter at Trainual. 6 hours of weekly customer calls are non-negotiable. It’s how they build a product that’s replica-proof.At the beginning of the episode, Taylor shares the story behind Trainual’s restructuring exercise that they went through after discovering inefficiencies that were stopping them from scaling. In Taylor’s words “people were stepping on each other’s feet too much”. He explains how a new vertical structure helped free teams and streamline workflow. About TaylorTaylor Sell is the Director of Product at Trainual. When he first started out at Trainual in 2019 he made sure that weekly customer call days are a staple of their discovery process. In fact, customer call days are 6 hours long. They take place every Friday - and you can’t weasel your way out of them if you’re part of Taylor’s product team.Key Web Links: Product Board (product management system): https://www.productboard.com/ Grain (recording tool): https://grain.co/ Follow Taylor Sell: LinkedIn Website: https://www.trainual.com/SHOWNOTES:0:10 | Who is Taylor Sell (Trainual)? 00:43 | The story behind the Trainual’s hyper-growth. 03:02 | Challenges that were hindering Trainual from scaling. 04:36 |  How creating product lines helped Trainual operate at scale. 06:28 | Getting buy-in from employees before shifting the workflow.08:27 | How long does it take to make a workflow shift in a start-up (and speed bumps along the way)? 11:41 | Opening avenues for relationship building when restructuring your start-up. 14:05 | How do you fill data gaps when you cannot get in front of your customer on time.19:25 | Why customer call days have to be a pillar of your discovery process. 21:25 | How to prepare for customer calls, what to focus on, and how long to spend preparing. 23:43 | Should you focus more on iterating existing features or rolling out new features?27:37 | Tools to help you track or discover new product requests. 29:37 | Why companies don’t invest in transparent product processes.  32:58 | How to avoid the distracting pressure of big clients.34:40 | Shiny object syndrome: how to develop a product that cannot be replicated.36:47 | Should you ask your users what you should build? (and how to phrase questions to extract useful information)39:21 | How to determine the validity of building a new feature from customer interviews. QUOTES:“As product managers, as people in product, we are juggling so many different things.  So if you really don’t carve out time to have those types of conversations or sit down with customers, you will fill it with a million other things that are on your plate. So, for us, we do customer call days every single week.”  Taylor Sell  - [17:50] “Do we want to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars building something that could be wrong or do we want to take a little bit of time for a couple of individuals to do some of that validation early on and the chance of success - the chance of building something that’s actually going to valuable to our customers is going to go much much higher. And so if you think about it that way and the money you’ll spend on a product that fails vs. spending a few hours upfront or a day upfront to make sure the success of that feature or product goes up significantly - it’s a no brainer.”  - Taylor Sell   [20:49] “It’s important to understand as a product leader, and as even product management, who is our customer? Who are we trying to solve for?  What are the problems that they have? And how do we solve those problems a thousand times better than anybody else in the market? And that should be your focus - it is doing something so well that people can’t reproduce it and people can’t replicate it easily.”  Taylor Sell  -  [35:13]

Think of the customer-led growth approach as a holistic psychotherapeutic user interview. Who is a product manager if not a therapist who is well-versed in their product?About AggelosAggelos Mouzakitis is a jobs-to-be-done customer researcher. He currently works at a company called Growth Sandwich in London and has master’s degree in psychotherapy. Aggelos is a qualitative researcher with passion for numbers. His take on hard data?  “I find them complex, inhumane, and they make me sleepy”. Tune in for more of his straight-shooting and insight-rich delivery.SHOW NOTES:0:00 | Who is Aggelos Mouzakitis? 00:34 | The story behind the brand name “Growth Sandwich” 01:07 | The difference between sales-led growth, product-led growth, and customer-led growth.04:40 | The impressive attention to detail of the customer-led growth research process. 09:50 | 3 reasons why some companies SHOULDN’T be product-led. 13:03 | Why you shouldn’t be completely product-led or completely sales-led. 16:34 | Best practices in the customer research process 23:14 | Do customers know what they want? (customer imagination)30:31 | How can product managers build better products? (Two scalable tactics that product managers don’t do enough) 34:13 | Quantitative vs. qualitative data in customer-led approach (and how to quantify qualitative data). 37:14 | Two breakthrough moments in Aggelos Mouzakitis’ career. 39:44 | Why qualitative research is unscalable but critical for great product management (and why you should do unscalable things). 43:35 | Two things every product manager must understand when they conduct research. QUOTES: “Customer led growth basically leverages mainly qualitative research to help a company drive product and growth decisions.” - Aggelos [01:20] “We cannot eradicate the human factor from any value proposition. The human factor has a position, and being product-led isn’t the silver bullet for everything.” - Aggelos  [12:48] “I would say, in pretty much any area - whether it is finance, whether its product or sales, when anybody has a polarizing opinion like ‘only do this’ it’s like black and white and they’re super aggressive - usually it is a red flag.” - Sergey  [15:40]“The perception of value that users expect is always biased from what they have seen already in their lives, from what they have experienced in competitor products.  So, if we would strictly ask customers ‘what do they want us to build’ we would have some sort of oligopoly where every solution would be almost the same.”  - Aggelos [24:15]“Customers are the worst to tell us what we should build. Customers, on the other hand, are great to tell us about their problems - and then we would figure out how to solve their problems.”  - Aggelos [26:47]“Empathy is the best way to be a good product manager even if you are not very sophisticated about quantitative stuff, and data, and graphs.”  - Aggelos [33:59] “What is a marketing problem? Is it a matter of the copy that you’re using in your ads? Targeting that you’re having? Nobody cares. What matters when your marketing doesn’t work is you are communicating something that doesn’t resonate with the people that see it.” - Aggelos [39:44]Connect with Aggelos LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aggelos-mouzakitis-25011218/Website: https://www.growthsandwich.com/

Feel free to DM Aram directly with product questions: https://www.linkedin.com/in/melkoumov/Specifically, in this event you’ll discover:- The right way to plan, strategize, design, and develop your MVP- The secret hacks we use to improve efficiency and output- A step-by-step breakdown of a real-world MVP we built for one of our clients’Our awesome panel: Aram Melkoumov (Founder and CEO of Crowdlinker)Fiona Haller (Director of Product at Crowdlinker)Sergey Ross (Event Host & Content Creator @ Crowdlinker)Who we are/what Crowdlinker does:Crowdlinker is an end-to-end digital product studio working with clients like Shopify, NBC Universal, MLSE, and over 50 others. Over the years, we’ve worked with Start-up Founders and Product Leaders across North America to bring their MVP to life by leveraging our design, development, and product talent.

About DanDan Toma is a founding partner at Outcome, a consultancy that helps large companies navigate innovation for the future while maintaining the health of their core business. An entrepreneur with a startup orientation, he brings a blue-chip depth of knowledge that spans the full spectrum of established industries. Co-author of "The Corporate Startup: How Established Companies Can Develop Successful Innovation Ecosystems," Dan is a seasoned guide who leverages the ecosystem approach to digital transformation and innovation. Among his clients: Bosch, Jaguar Land Rover, Deutsche Telekom, Bayer, John Deer and Allianz. He has also worked with government bodies in Asia and Europe to augment development capabilities and implement national business acceleration strategies noted for their innovative vision. His most recent book is "Innovation Accounting: A Practical Guide for Measuring Your Innovation Ecosystem's Performance."Key Takeaways0:00 | Introduction to Dan Toma, including his professional bio and thoughts on browsers.1:36 | About Dan’s recent book, "Innovation Accounting: A Practical Guide for Measuring Your Innovation Ecosystem's Performance." 3:28 | The Innovation Accounting system is useful for telling the story of an entrepreneurial venture before the hard data indicators are fully available.4:00 | Dan provides a first-hand account of the importance of aligning your product with corporate strategy to protect against being dropped for amorphous reasons.6:03 | Dan’s personal experience working with “Zombie” products that were dropped amidst a leadership change that left a bullseye on product development. The reason given not only to stop financing the product but to kill the product altogether was a vague “lack of alignment.”8:54 | It’s not uncommon in Dan’s practice to see accelerators flounder when their labs aren’t aligned with internal corporate strategy, leaving project orphans with no internal champion or home at the end of the process.10:40 | Beware false assumptions that can leave you out of step as a product owner with the overall corporate strategic umbrella.11:33 | Defensive strategies: Ensure you have internal corporate sponsorship and understand the strategic shifts likely to occur in the near- and medium-term. If your development road map for a combustion engine extends beyond the deadline for eliminating combustion engines … You have left yourself in a precarious position.13:36 | It’s incumbent upon corporate culture and governance to establish transparent strategic plans, widely accessible for internal and external innovators with product development ideas.15:41 | Strategy and sponsorship are key when it comes to establishing an initial stake. Then your results can start to speak for your value-add.16:30 | The importance of stakeholder management. If you are a product owner within a large organization, your startup orientation within the larger organization is key. Who are your influencers, champions and where do they stand? It’s up to you to gauge information flow and cultivate those relationships.18:49 | Innovation metrics must evolve as projects evolve, adjusting expectations and performance evaluations based on the changing playing field.20:52 | It’s important to look at both process metrics and results metrics. One impacts the other, and it’s all too easy to mislabel key indicators and distort the actual landscape.24:20 | When your development process doesn’t exist out of the gate? Consider it good fortune. No one is going to hold you accountable to a legacy expectation and you are in a position, along with your product team, to optimize your own product innovation processes.25:25 | If you have an opportunity to establish your own product development process, look outside the building. Have a conversation, read the books, read the blogs, attend the conferences and do it better than it has been done before!25:44 | Where to find Dan’s books. His first book, “The Corporate Startup,” can be purchased here. His latest offering will soon be widely available in North America with more information available immediately at the Innovation Accounting website.Contact DanWebsite: www.innovationaccountingbook.com@LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dantoma/

Follow me on Linkedin for quickest product show updates, new episodes and highlight clips.Key Takeaways:0:00 | Introduction to Peter LePiane1:30 | Keeping large remote groups engaged requires a strategy – and realism.5:31 | Peter defines change management and what it encompasses.8:12 | About internal cultural indicators (i.e. mindsets) that can stall change adoption. 10:56 | Deploying an experimental if/then orientation to successfully effect change. 19:21 | Change mindsets require leadership that embraces a surrender to uncertainty. 16:00 | Going first and being authentic about the result is hard but essential to change.18:55 | All about MBAs: Peter’s observations about their role, utility and liability. 22:25 | Why (& how) some organizations excel at product discovery, where others flounder.25:50 | Knowing Your Customer is a muscle that must be exercised regularly at all levels. 27:27 | Customer feedback is critical — and low-hanging fruit waiting to be plucked. 28:44 | Peter recommends tactics and trainings leaders can implement to foster change.32:00 | In-house vs. outside consultants: Outsourcing change isn’t sustainable on its own; tools and strategies must be adopted/integrated internally as well. 38:36 | Peter explains his statistical model (“Estimatic”) for growth and how it creates probabilities for a range of business outcomes applicable in both the corporate and startup world.43:15 | Peter explains why harnessing variables and associated cost estimates plays such a critical role in product development. 45:14 | Product design without probabilities factored in is a recipe for failure.46:08 | Final Words of Wisdom: Peter underscores that change can’t occur without surrender to risk and vulnerability.Key Quotes:“Lean change management is really an experimenter’s mindset on top of putting together step-by-step templates that are basically … an if/then statement." [12:55]“Lean change management transforms a very static, linear change model into something that is kind of living, breathing and adaptable.” [13:18]“Learning is the precursor to ROI … It’s more steady-state change than steady-state status quo in terms of growth.” [14:47]“The only way people can learn is through failing and learning about why that happened. And the ROI really starts to kick in once there has been enough learning.” (Aram) [17:46]“Humans are not predictable and, if you think that they are, you’re most likely going to get bit either sooner or later.”  [20:47] “There is an often unfounded fear (among many employees) of saying something wrong and damaging brand and damaging their own reputation.” [26:24]“You’ve got to lead by change. Leaders have to be the first ones to put the (change) mindset into place.” (Aram) [28:12] “The only thing that seems to teach us as humans is failure … The only other way would be to have someone influential in your life, maybe a mentor, go through the same thing.” [30:10]“One of the hazards of the job (of consulting) is getting knife marks in your back.” [38:18]“Thinking in terms of probabilities allows you to then get another lens (into product development) … validate where the risk is and then get curious.” [44:18]Follow Peter LePiane: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/peterlepiane/Twitter: https://twitter.com/peterlepianeKoach: https://www.koach.net/en/profile/1022413541/show

Follow me on Linkedin for quickest product show updates, new episodes and highlight clips.Get Radical Product Thinking book here:https://www.radicalproduct.com/https://www.amazon.com/Radical-Product-Thinking-Mindset-Innovating/dp/1523093315Highlights:- How to think like “everything is a product”- Writing a product vision like a user story: dos and don’t- Myth about Steve Jobs not doing user testing- When is the right time to pivot as a startup and when is notAbout Radhika DuttRadhika is the author of Radical Product Thinking: The New Mindset for Innovating Smarter. An entrepreneur and product leader, she has participated in four acquisitions, two of which were companies that she founded. She has built products in industries including broadcasting, media, advertising technology, government, consumer, robotics, and wine. Dutt advises organizations from high-tech startups to government agencies on building radical products that create a fundamental change instead of optimizing the status quo. She also teaches entrepreneurship and innovation at Northeastern University’s D’Amore-McKim School of Business. Dutt cofounded Radical Product Thinking as a movement of leaders creating vision-driven change and is a frequent speaker at business events and conferences around the world. She graduated from MIT with a bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering and speaks nine languages, currently learning her tenth.

Follow me on Linkedin for quickest product show updates, new episodes and highlight clips.Highlights: - Moshe’s journey to product management- Difference between B2B and B2C product development- How to get better at managing a product- How Moshe wrote his first novel called “Ressurector” About MosheMoshe is a leader in product management who started his career on the engineering side, specifically within the enterprise real-time B2B software space. He fell in love with product management after seeing the gap that existed between what customers wanted and what engineering produced. Moshe enjoys applying his lean iterative approach to develop products that exceed users’ expectations. Moshe co-host the Product for Product Podcast where he talks about products that product professionals use.

In this captivating discussion, guest Ben Yoskovitz, an entrepreneur and co-founder at Highline Beta, delves into the critical missteps many startups make by not addressing genuine problems. He discusses the allure of trend-driven ventures like carpooling and critiques their lack of real innovation. Yoskovitz stresses the importance of focusing on true market needs and the value of the DVF Framework in product development. By emphasizing intellectual honesty, he urges founders to rigorously validate their ideas to navigate the complex startup landscape successfully.

Follow me on Linkedin for quickest product show updates, new episodes and highlight clips.Highlights:- Dustin’s career path to becoming a chief product officer- What enterprise companies can adopt from startups to empower product managers- What does product development cycle looks like at Dustin’s company Apex- Process to define user personas at ApexAbout DustinDustin is the Chief Product Officer at Apex which is a digital wealth management solution that is set to IPO and is valued at nearly $5 billion. At his current role, Dustin is responsible for the product and strategy of Apex Fintech Solutions Previously Dustin has held engineering and product roles at IBM, Canonical, Gazzang, and Google.   

Follow me on Linkedin for quickest product show updates, new episodes and highlight clips.Highlights: - Qualities all great product managers have- You don’t need to take PM courses - What to look for when hiring a PM and onboarding themAbout CamilaCamila is a product manager with a previous career in photography and a creative background, and she advocates for great and functional design for not only the products she builds but the processes and workflows to support them. She has worked at Canon Canada, 500px, Felix Health, Sparrow Living Inc., and is currently on a personal break focusing on her writing.