The Remarkable SaaS Podcast

The focus of this week´s podcast is product strategy, and in particular, what we can do to not only make jobs more productive, but also more enjoyable. I discuss this with my guest, Olaf Groth. He is a professor, adviser and executive for the evolving global innovation economy with 20 years of experience in corporations, consulting firms and academia. He has helped build new ventures and change management initiatives for employers and clients in energy, technology, telecommunications, aerospace and transportation sectors in 30+ countries.The topic of his book triggered me, hence I invited Olaf to my podcast.Here are some of his quotes:“We believe that AI is here to stay, and that we as human beings, and certainly we, as business decision makers, need to get used to what we call symbiotic intelligence. So symbiotic intelligence between humans and machines.We have an opportunity here to shape these jobs such that they are not more not just more productive, but also much more enjoyableWe should get engaged and shape it and not over-regulate too early, but rather say: in a perfect world, what would that world look like? And what do we need to do to get there?What the work is that is being done, where the value is being added, and then try to understand where humans and machines could collaborate much more elegantly, and in a much more integrated fashion.We will find out as humans that there is so much more fun to be had once we get used to this transition, right? The real fun is when we, as humans, see images of what we want evolving, emerging from the current picture.”By listening to this interview, you will learn three things:Why a design goal for solution should not just be increased productivity, but more importantly how it shapes a more enjoyable work experience.That to create the solutions of the future you should anticipate the job profiles of the futureWhy choosing augmentation over automation will give you golden opportunities to deliver not only unique value for your customers, but also the highest adoption rates.

The guest on this week's podcast is Dr. Levanon, Chief Science Officer at Beyond Verbal, and we discuss the product innovation that´s going on in the area of voice recognition.Dr. Levanon has multiple degrees in Physics, Mathematics, Statistics and Operations Research from the Hebrew University and the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology.This multi-disciplinary background is the fuel behind various breakthroughs in the field of Emotions Analytics. At Beyond Verbal, he’s responsible for the core research team and its scientific discoveries. In that role, they developed technology that can not only understand the clicks, typed texts, speech or touch, but also how they feel and what they mean.I got triggered by the phrase on their website, “it’s not what you say, it’s how you say it”, hence I invited Dr. Levanon to my podcast. I really wanted to know how this technology can intelligently augment people in various industries to deliver remarkable impact. As such, we discuss how voice analysis can be used to impact one’s health and wellbeing, but also how the same technology can, for example, help marketers improve the relationship with customers by obtaining a deeper understanding what they really mean. Here are some of his quotes:The idea is that the voice is telling us a lot about ourselves.We have recognized until now many mental problems and diseases through the voice.Now I understand that through the voice I can recognize your well-being. Our well-being can be recognized through the health status, but also through the emotional status.Therefore, the idea was, "How shall we improve your well-being, to understanding both sides of you?"It's not only that, but how I can improve the relationship between a company and its clients, or its employees,We can look at every inch of the organization as a group of people in what gets the results, the achievements, is the spirit, the group spirit. When somebody is fighting the other, the results will be very problematic.By listening to this interview, you will learn three things:How to add new levels of differentiation to your company/solution: emotions drive everything we do, yet voice-driven emotions analytics remains the most important, unexplored interface today.How, by applying voice analytics, you could change the performance of any role.Why analyzing voice could have a large impact on society (and thus your customers) because of its ability to solve the problem of skills shortage.

This podcast is focused on product innovation in the water infrastructure sector, and my guest this week is Doug Hatler, Vice President of Sales & Marketing at Fracta. Beyond sales and marketing Doug brings many years of experience as a management consultant, environmental regulatory specialist, and as a civil/environmental engineer. He is a published industry expert and featured speaker on the Environment, Sustainability, Compliance and Risk.He earned a Bachelor’s Degree in Environmental Science and an MBA from Rutgers University. He earned a Master’s Degree in Environmental Engineering from the New Jersey Institute of Technology.I got intrigued by the headline on Fracta’s website: "Bringing Artificial Intelligence to infrastructure to solve a $1 trillion problem”. This is why I invited Doug to my podcast. We explore the growing issue of aging water infrastructure and why a conventional approach is not going help. We discuss how technology such as AI is used to augment engineers, and how that human/machine combination brings exponential impact by preventing the waste of precious time, money, and water.Here are a couple of quotes from him:We are looking to digitally transform and revolutionize how the water industry is looking at water mains, looking at condition assessments.Any asset is designed to work a number of years and then you may get some extra time out of it, but eventually, it has to be replaced. That's what happening now.The rough numbers are a million dollars a mile to replace a mile of pipe, so you're looking at about a trillion dollars.Some cities are ahead of it, some cities are behind. On average, most cities are somewhere between a quarter to a half a percent, maybe six-tenths of a percent so they're pushing to get up. The struggle they have is we have a very, very wide socioeconomic and demographic spectrum.Anything you going to do is going to put pressure on the ratepayers to pay higher ratesWe're at a point where we can't shy away from it."By listening to this interview, you will learn three things:That you should always keep challenging your approach – your initial idea might be the most obvious, but looking at the desired outcome in different ways might give you better routes to success – if so, be ready to pivot.Why it is important to always keep looking around you for alternative market you could deliver value – there might one that’s easier to enter and own right in front of youHow one of the largest roadblock to get a solution market can be inertia - especially in industries that have been working in a similar way for decades

This podcast is about product strategy, and my guest on the podcast is Nadja Muller, Founder and CEO of iThrive, a personal coach on your smartphone that helps you to transform counterproductive habits in order to thrive.It’s a common fact that healthy and happy employees are generally more productive, but many people still experience stress and burnout issues. This is what iThrive is designed to transform, and in doing so, it promises to increase productivity at work by 400%This triggered me, hence I invited Nadia to my podcast. We explore what it means to make people thrive and how technology can play a fundamental role in that transformation. We thereby discuss what is required to win the hearts of the user by creating a solution they trust and actually want to use on a day-to-day basis.Here are some of her quotes:Thriving means that people are strong, they're successful, they're healthy, they're balancedThe idea is to help people to move towards secure attachment, towards that's thriving, towards the balance.When you look at longitudinal studies that have been studying people for a long time, seeing how they're changing their behavior, it is so that actually, only 10 percent of the time we succeed on our own.People that were able to succeed had either a coach or a supportive partner, or they had a mentor or something else that was really strong supporting figure in their life.That's basically what we are aiming to do with Jean, and doing it on a really low entry barrier way. Available everywhere, 24/7, it doesn't cost much.When an employee is happy, less sick, the productivity goes up. It has a positive effect on the entire team which again inspires higher productivity is on you. It's just amazing what happens in an organization when you have thriving people.By listening to this interview, you will learn three thingsThat a strong way to grow adoption of your solutions is to understand what makes the user tick – what motivates them.How real value can be created by not just focusing on getting things fixed, but to actually focus on changing the underlying behaviors that cause the issue in the first place.That your business gets really convincing for a customer when you’re able to convince them about the upside your solution will bring them beyond the notion of just cost reduction.

This interview focuses on the product innovation opportunity for the marketing community, and my guest on the podcast is Dan Mallin, co-founder and CEO of Equals 3. For nearly 20 years, he has established a solid track record in creating, growing and transforming businesses, ranging from technology services, sales, marketing and business development.Dan has twice been recognized as a finalist for the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year, he is a finalist for the MHTA Tekne award and he has been recognized by the Business Journal as one of 40 Under 40.On my hunt for compelling stories that demonstrate the value we can create when technology augments the unique strength of people, I stumbled upon Equals 3 – and as the name reveals – their mantra is: Better than the individual and better than the machine, are the two together. You + Lucy = 3And this intrigued me, hence I invited Dan to my podcast. During our interview, we explore the day-to-day challenges of CMOs and marketers with regards to analyzing and reporting on market data to drive segmentation and positioning decisions, and how this can be addressed with product innovation. We discuss how technology such as AI can help to not only speed up this process exponentially, but actually help to take outcomes to complete new levels of impact by revealing new insights, enabling marketeers to ask different and better questions, lowering Cost Per Action (CPA) and even guiding them to communicate more clearly. That’s pure competitive advantage.Here are some of Dan’s quotes:“Equals 3 is all about augmented intelligence, not artificial intelligence in the concept of 1+1=3 or you+Lucy=3. Lucy makes you better than she would be alone and better than you would be aloneLucy is an answer engine, not a search engineIt gives access to places in the corporation where data exists.If I have to spend a hundred, two hundred hours doing something to get the analysis that I need to get to, and that can be multiple people but the equivalent of that, or if I can do it in four hours or five minutes, what is that speed worth to the organization?If your competition is doing it and you're not, then they'll be able to move faster, market faster, may react to whatever you're doing, understand things and deliver in a superior way.”By listening to this podcast, you will learn three things:How exponential value can be created by going beyond ‘just’ automation and embracing intelligence augmentation for any use caseWhy the way to explore innovation opportunities is not about optimizing the process as such, but to find ways to eliminate the process altogether to shift the focus to what really mattersAnd why investing in machine learning is not about value creation today, but even more about value creation tomorrow by using all new insights to just get better and better

The focus of this podcast is product innovation, and my guest is Rob Bromage, CEO of IntelliHR. IntelliHR is an Australian HR technology business developing and marketing a next-generation people management platform, which is stock listed on the ASX index.Before he became the CEO of IntelliHR, he ran Human Capital Management Consulting organization. He also founded Resource Partners – an investment organization for the incubation and development of Intellectual Property in the Human Resources Sector.As you can guess, his passion is people, performance, and enabling technologies. Rob believes people are an organization's greatest asset and that there is a great opportunity for every business to leverage this valuable and powerful driver for economic success.This triggered me, hence I invited Rob to my podcast. We explore the secrets of driving performance through people in order to become a high-performance organization. We dive into the role of disruptive technologies such as predictive analytics and natural language processing, and how these tools can raise performance and engagement.Here are some of Rob’s quotes:I think fundamentally, a lot of leaders don't necessarily have the information or the tools that they need to look after their staff. I think a lot of businesses do exactly that, they think that the way we get performance is from the top down, but it's really about empowering people bottom up.If you focus on connecting staff with their leaders and improving their conversations, really creating meaningful conversations and supporting them to be aligned around expectations, then you're just going to naturally create a circle of understandingHR, in my opinion, is the best place, function, role in any organization to impact performanceThey really should be involved in connecting the customer strategy with the people's strategy or the people strategy with the customer strategy.If they're spending their time on administrative or compliance tasks, they are a wasted asset in my opinion.By listening to this interview, you will learn three things:How old traditional processes (such as for example applicant tracking) can be disrupted by re-imagining it with the concepts and technologies from other processes around us.Why HR and People management is not about software, but about creating meaningful outcomes that change behavior and impact on culture.That in order to drive a significant increase in performance and people engagement, a core design goal should be to make solutions addictive.

The focus of this week's podcast is product strategy, and more specifically, how to shift from focusing on interesting problems towards valuable problems. My guest is Danny Saksenberg, Co-founder / CEO of Emerge. He started his career as an actuary at Deloitte and then started to immerse himself into the world of machine learning and AI. He was part of the team at Jemstep.com to build one of the first and leading robo-advisors for the Financial Services industry.In 2012, he founded Emerge together with Laurence Rau. Emerge helps companies to make money from operations by making them super-efficient and improving customer experience. To accomplish this, Emerge works in partnership with the world’s largest and most trusted consulting companies, software giants and directly with corporates to develop constantly-learning, operational solutions to valuable and consequential problems.He refers to himself as passionate about thinking differently and unlocking potential. In his words “I am always looking for more problems”. This triggered me, hence I invited Danny to my podcast.We explore what’s required for AI and Machine Learning to reach their full potential in solutions; Data is just a part of that puzzle. We review the difference in impact between solutions that improve efficiency and solutions that improve the experience. And last but not least, we address how the outcomes of AI will reveal new insights, help transform thinking inside organizations, and, in turn, inspire the creation of new processes and procedures. Here are some of his quotes:"People are spending a lot of time focusing on interesting problems and not so much on valuable problems.we genuinely believe that the solutions to the world's biggest problems are in data and there aren't enough people tackling that properlyWhat gets people excited is that you identify a problem that is hurting their business or an opportunity and you develop a solution that takes advantage of that.What we're finding is that we're able to get machines to do things that far exceed what humans can do.But where humans become much more useful is where we can get them to be strategic in terms of working out where they would like the machines to be deployedWe're getting businesses starting to ask more of the right questions.Identify the bottlenecks in their business and focus on those.I think ultimately it boils down to what can you do to serve the public better? The more value you add to them or to more people, the better your business will do.”By listening to this interview, you will learn three things:That to solve the world’s biggest problems and build the most impactful solutions for the future, we need to develop multi-disciplinary people who blend expertise in AI and business.Why it’s critical to view your customers as partners (not as clients) in order to create a meaningful and lasting impact.How by building solutions that go beyond ‘just insight’, but instead also actively help ‘solve’ the problem by changing behavior, you can grow value exponentially.

My guest on the podcast is Paul Teshima, CEO and Co-founder of Nudge.AIHe is the CEO and Co-founder of Nudge.ai, a relationship intelligence platform that augments sales professionals around the world to access new accounts, analyze deal risk, and measure account health.He is a successful technology executive who has run Services, Customer Success, Account Management, Support and Product Management teams.Earlier in his career, Paul was part of Eloqua’s executive team, and helped lead the company from $0 to over $100 million in revenue, then through IPO and a successful acquisition by Oracle.The big idea behind Nudge is ‘Your Network is Your Net Worth’. That triggered me, hence I invited Paul to my podcast.During our interview, we explore how technology such as AI can play a significant role in increasing the impact salespeople can make by intelligently augmenting them, and how it can augment sales management by making CRM data smarter to optimize forecast predictions and their ability to coach their team. Last but not least, we address why today’s generation CRM tools are inadequate, especially around its core principle, the ‘R’ of Relationship. Here are some of his quotes:The big idea is that your network is your net worthIf you're going to be successful in sales moving forward, you have to value relationships. You have to build them and grow them over time. You have to use your network as a way to differentiate yourself against other sellers going for the same businessNudge, fundamentally, calculates the strength of relationships that you haveWe can be smart about the things we recommend you do on a day-by-day basis.We take that layer of what we call relationship intelligence. Who knows who and how well.The system helps them bring those two data points together so you get the best use of your company's network to get you into deals.We're seeing companies generate hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars of pipeline very quickly because of thatDuring this interview, you will learn three things:How big impact can be created by rethinking business software’s ability to change behaviour of users.Why it’s key to not only understand the breadth of our networks, but more importantly, the strength of each connection within it.That’s success is not so much about the problem you solve, but more about the size of the problem you solve. If you want to create big impact, tackle a big problem.

My guest on the podcast is Toby Allen, founder of Jobs in XR. He’s a HoloLens producer at Microsoft, the founder and CEO of TACON, a technology management consultancy, and the founder of Jobs in XR, the first and only jobs portal for all digital realities.I got in touch with Toby via a comment on one of my earlier podcasts with Dr. Terence Tse. Being an innovative product expert that brings ideas to life using Augmented, Virtual, and Mixed Reality – he teased us with the potential of bringing HoloLens and AI together to deliver remarkable impact.That triggered me, hence I invited Toby to my podcast. We explore the benefits of an increasingly hands-free world, how the combination of new technology platforms such as blockchain, AI, and augmented reality have the potential of transforming complete industries, and how we should use that opportunity to think big to create new solutions that are both fun to use, and remarkable in their impact.Here are some of Toby’s quotes:"There are three key things I'm fundamentally excited by. First of all is mixed reality.I think the ability to visualize your worlds in a hands-free capacity, augment it with holograms, and information and view that information in a new way is absolutely incredible. To get that, there's a real drive to understand AI and the power of information that you can have.There's also just blockchain is a very nice interesting way of creating a trust and an authenticity in the data.Those three are the perfect combination. There's going to be a very interesting shift in the industry and in professional business as to how those three key technologies are going to integrate within businessesThat could lead to results that we've never seen before."During this interview, you will learn three things:Why the current generation of solutions is still distracting us too way much – and how by avoiding this distraction we could literally save livesHow blending new technologies can help us in much smarter ways to actually avoid errors, problems, and wasteWhat opportunities we can create if we start using technology to change behaviors and impact by augmenting people in contextually relevant ways

My guest on the podcast is Stephen Browning, Interim Challenge Director Next Generation Services at Innovate UK. He holds an MBA from Imperial College and a Bachelor of Science in Electronic Engineering. He spent nearly 20 years working for Philips Semiconductors and NXP where he held various software engineering, project management, and business management roles. During this time, he formed close collaborations between customers and supplier to deliver open R&D programmes.Today, he’s leading the Next Generation Services programme as part of the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund. This programme is aimed at supporting the competitive transformation of the UK’s Accountancy, Insurance and Legal Services sectors by the responsible use of AI and data.This inspired me, hence I invited Stephen to my podcast. We explore the approach and urgency to transform the 3 very traditional industries. We address the opportunity this creates and why it’s required to take a broader perspective than simply ‘technology’. Here are some of Stephen’s quotes:Our role is to support the industry to innovate and, thus, support economic growth for the country.The basic idea of the program is that artificial intelligence and the increasingly soft data will transform every sector of the economy.We were trying to look at areas where the UK had a particular strength, but where there was a risk of AI and data coming in, disrupting that, and meaning that the UK's, its own strength would diminish somehow.Ultimately, we have to drive the economic race. We want to make sure that that economic race happens as much as possible in a way that it's going to help people rather than just be a complete replacement. We are very much looking at that human plus machine approach.By listening to this interview, you will learn three things:Why doing things better and faster is not enough to create transformative change and protect competitivenessHow technology can be a lever to significantly expand market opportunity by addressing non-customersWhat’s required to concur inertia in a company/sector to remain relevant?