Product Quest Podcast

Today we will dive into the challenges of becoming and being a Product manager with Dr. Bart Jaworski. Bart is a Senior Product Manager at StepStone, he has worked as a Senior Product Manager at Microsoft and is a LinkedIn Top Product Management Voice. Through his online courses on https://drbartpm.com/ he has trained over 18.000 people in various aspects of Product Management – from how to land a PM job to running Design Sprints and much more.

In our podcast we often talk about innovation frameworks, models, theories and so on. While these topics are important, innovation success also depends A LOT on people and how they collaborate – or not. With our guest Sebastian Hamers of human insight, we want to talk about people and how they are best put together to achieve high innovation performance teams. Sebastian has worked in and studied innovative entrepreneurship and business development in depth. Be it at the University of Twente and hop to spin out patents and technologies developed there. He worked at a Growth Accelerator Program before joining human insight where he is the managing partner.

Today, we welcome our special guest….and our first repeat guest, Leah Tharin. And, well well well, where to begin?  Last January, I was captivated by Leah’s writing on a topic that I knew nothing about, Product Led Growth even as I myself lead Product for The AIM Institute..  In getting up to speed, I found Leah’s writing to be concise, educational, entertaining, sometimes irreverent, often funny, but always…USEFUL. And I’m not the only one.  She had 12k followers on LinkedIn when I reached out to her in January. I think it was around 15k by the time she appeared on the podcast. Today she’s over 34k and by the time you crazy people hear this episode, I expect she’ll be over 40k.  And… as a result…, Leah has created some new opportunities for herself recently. And we are certain to get into that. 

Today we welcome Prof. Dr. Frank Piller of the RWTH Aachen University. Dr. Piller is considered one of the leading German experts for innovation management, open innovation, customer co-creation and product individualization. His research has received numerous awards, like the PDMA Co-Creation Award or the nomination for the “Innovating Innovation” award from Harvard Business Review and McKinsey. He previously worked at the MIT Sloan School of Management before becoming a professor in Aachen where he is now the Head of Chair of the Institute for Technology & Innovation Management. Frank habilitated in 2004 on Open Innovation and User Innovation at the TUM Business School in Munich, where he headed the research group “Customer Driven Value Creation”. I got to know Frank and his work in more detail by going through the Micro Master Program at the RWTH on “Managing Technology and Innovation: How to deal with disruptive change” which I can only recommend. All this screams for having him on the podcast and not lastly because in that course he mentions his appreciation of the Jobs-to-be-done approach which is something of a household philosophy here at the Product Quest Podcast.   Here are the additional links that we talked about:   Lead User Method: https://evhippel.mit.edu/teaching/   Lead user input and cocreation for innovation: https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/reducing-the-risks-of-new-product-development/ https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1975523   Paper on AI and innovation and the double diamond model: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jpim.12656 (free download)   Self Driving Chemical Labs https://www.matter.toronto.edu/basic-content-page/ai-for-discovery-and-self-driving-labs https://www.nature.com/articles/s44160-022-00231-0   The Nature article with the material science experiment I described: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1335-8   (Summary: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01978-x)   edX: Free Innovation classes https://www.edx.org/micromasters/rwthx-managing-technology-and-innovation-how-to-deal-with-disruptive-change   Executive Program on Using AI for Innovation (taught entirely in VR) https://thegemba.com/course/leading-intelligent-engineering-vr    Innovation master program at RWTH: https://www.business-school.rwth-aachen.de/en/programs/m-sc-management-engineering-in-technology-innovation-marketing-entrepreneurship/  

This is episode number 50 and we’re thrilled to have Hannah Keartland as a guest for this milestone episode. No pressure Hannah! Hannah is an award-winning strategic thinker with 20+ years of extensive and varied leadership experience as a director and on the board level. She has worked in finance, in for-purpose businesses, charities and as an innovation consultant. Today she’s all in on impact for example as a co-founder of the Impact Pioneers, an invitation only community of business leaders who want to have an impact in the world. She’s a fellow of the Institute of Chartered Accountants and a member of their sustainability Committee and has several expert advisory roles. She lives and breathes impact and has so for a long time: She wrote her first impact report in 2007 – so, way before it was cool! She founded Keartland & Co and helps business leaders maximize and scale their positive impact on the world. Oh, and did I mention she’s a TEDx speaker? So, without further ado, Hannah, welcome to the product quest podcast!   Hannah: https://www.keartland.co/ Project Drawdown: https://www.drawdown.org/ WWF Sustainable Office guide: https://www.wwf.org.uk/media/57626

Today, we welcome our special guest, Patrick McGowan.  is the CEO and founder of The Service Design Group, a firm that specializes in service innovation. It should be no surprise then, that Patrick is an expert in service design.  He has well over two decades of experience, first with IBM before launching his own firm. Patrick has a really interesting background though, having graduated from design school at NC State… which one of the most difficult bachelor’s programs to get into, at least here in North Carolina. I’m curious as to how he leverages that knowledge, but we’ll get into that in a bit.  Patrick’s firm, The Service Design Group, has an impressive list of clients across industrial, governmental, biotech categories…. just to name a few.   But on a personal level, Patrick is engaging, funny, super smart… just the person that you want walking into your door when you want to upgrade your service game.

Dive into the intriguing intersection of philosophy and product theory! Discover how Jobs-to-be-Done predicts solution adoption by emphasizing utility. The hosts explore whether future goals can drive present actions and debate the nature of reasons as causes of behavior. Learn about Aristotle's four causes and their relevance to understanding customer needs. The discussion also touches on innovation opportunities created by examining constraints. Get ready for a thought-provoking ride into the philosophy of product thinking!

Dive into an intriguing exploration of Jobs-to-be-Done through a philosophical lens. The hosts reconstruct JTBD as a compelling argument about how humans evaluate solutions to achieve their goals. They debate the nuances of rationality versus reasonableness and critique the notion of customer irrationality, presenting behaviors as rational choices based on personal goals. Discussions on technology evaluation, the impact of cost and network effects, and the influence of framing in decision-making add depth to this thought-provoking conversation.

In today’s episode we welcome Gretchen Goffe. Gretchen is on a mission to make design thinking accessible to everyone. She’s the founder and CEO of the DT-Live-lab that helps companies become customer-centric at scale through teaching and training teams on human-centered approaches to innovation and customer experience. She has 20+ years’ experience in innovation in many industries such as consumer goods, as finance, and healthcare. She was also the Executive Director of the innovation initiative at Ohio State University’s Fisher College of Business and is a member of Fast Company. In short: There’s a ton of experience to dive into here, so let’s get to it!

Today, we welcome our special guest, Büsra Çoskuner. Büsra is an experienced product manager who now as the founder of Producteer. Se coaches, mentors other product managers and helps companies to develop their product management function.  In reading Büsras bios, what I’m immediately attracted to is that she is a practitioner FIRST… and coach/mentor second.  The product manager position is much better understood than it was even 5, 10 years ago. And I personally appreciate the revolution that practitioner leaders, such as Byshra, are leading the charge.