Latest / ContraMinds Podcast - Unlocking Personal Growth and Professional Excellence / The Super CMO Show - David Fradin (#007)

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The Super CMO Show - David Fradin (#007) · ContraMinds Podcast - Unlocking Personal Growth and Professional Excellence

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_04: So a couple weeks later, Ken Zerby, who came back from running Europe operations and returned to his role as uh chief financial officer, called me up and he says, I'm the garbage man for the company.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_04: I get all the garbage divisions, and you're one of them.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_04: Uh I hear you know a little bit about the Apple III.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_04: Uh would you like to be the uh uh business unit manager?
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_04: And I said, Well, I love being the bum, okay.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_04: And they gave me a$4 million budget, a headcount of 17 people, which means a secretary was equivalent to an engineer, which is a silly way of budgeting, but that's the way they did things back then.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_04: Uh and uh that's what MBA schools uh taught, just to headcount, not what it costs.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_04: And uh we went out and sold uh 25,000 Apple IIIs.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_04: I forget the exact numbers, but I think we had about a$600 million profit in today's numbers, kept about a thousand to fifteen hundred uh uh Apple employees employed.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_04: In fact, uh quite a few of them were MBAs.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_04: And uh we didn't have the concept of the Boston Consulting Group of the Cash Cow at the time, where the thing was fully developed.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_04: We just needed to make money off of it.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_04: We had uh 40% margin, which is unheard of today, uh, and a lot of very happy people in offices and businesses uh worldwide that just loved the computer, which uh uh uh encouraged me to maybe run a cocaine test on the keyboard because people just love typing on that keyboard.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_04: Uh and uh 11 months later I shut the product line down, handed off everything to uh Guy Kawasaki at the Macintosh Division so that the customers uh would have their data preserved uh and kept a lot of those people as loyal Apple customers uh to this very day, 30 some years later.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to another edition of the Super CMO podcast.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: In this podcast, we are talking to David Fredden.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: David Fredden is the president of Spice Catalyst, he is a product management and a product marketing consultant, he is a mentor, he is a professor, and arguably David is one of the world's foremost authorities on product management.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_00: He is an author of two incredibly great books, Product Design and Management Toolkit, Building Insanely Great Products, and he has trained thousands of people on product management.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_00: He talks on product management, product strategy, product success management, and his belief is that product managers need to be called product success managers.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_00: He also believes that the product managers of today need to be given all the authority and responsibility to build great products.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_00: In this episode, he talks to me about the fundamentals of product management.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_00: What does it take to build great products, his experience at Apple and HP, what did he learn there, and what are the key tenets of product management?
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_00: Over to my conversation with David.
• 3:18
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• 6:01
  SPEAKER_00: Hi David, thanks a lot for uh joining the Super CMO podcast, spending time and talking to us about product management, about your experience with product management, and it's lovely having you as a guest in our podcast.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_04: Pleasure to be with you.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_00: David, as I read through your uh impressive bio, one thing that uh caught my attention was the fact that you are a FAA trained flight instructor.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_00: I think uh you talk about the fact that uh the hostile environment there actually taught a lot about product management for you.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_00: So can you just talk to me about how both of them are connected?
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, well, as a flight instructor, uh you have to allow your students to make mistakes without killing you.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_04: Uh and they uh typically learn more from making mistakes than uh uh from getting it right perfectly all the time.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_04: And that was one of the nice things about my experience working at Hewlett-Packard and at Apple is that both companies had a set of values, and uh they pretty much said work hard and it's perfectly okay to make mistakes, knowing full well that uh people will learn uh from those mistakes.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_04: Uh the other thing that I learned as a uh flight instructor and as a pilot is that you have to learn how to juggle things uh all at the same time.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_04: It's sort of like uh they say flying a helicopter is like uh rubbing your tummy and patting your head at the same time.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_04: Uh and uh so uh it was it was quite interesting when I was uh I started the flying club at the University of Michigan with a private pilot's license.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_04: A year or so later, I had enough hours and experience to get my flight instructor's uh rating uh to go out and uh teach people um uh accelerated stalls and spins at uh 5,000 feet and to uh recover from them and then have to go to an English class in the afternoon.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so that's quite a quite uh you know contrast to what you did in the morning and what you did in the afternoon.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, and as a pilot, you have to learn and understand uh aerodynamics, uh weather, um uh flying certain certain kinds of patterns like the aircraft uh landing pattern, the takeoff, and so forth, reading charts, uh reading the sky, uh reading weather maps, predicting the and forecasting uh the weather yourself, and then the uh behavioral things uh that uh if you uh uh lose your vision outside due to weather, for example, or it's nighttime, and the ground is is covered with uh fog, you can't see anything, it's all black, uh you have to learn how to fly the plane solely uh on the basis of the instruments and to trust your instruments and not your physiological uh feelings.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_04: So a lot of things uh uh are combined in the art of uh flying.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_04: And the same thing is true of product management.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_04: Uh the number one thing that a product manager, I prefer to call them the product success manager, has to do is to put together uh what I call the product market strategy or product market plan.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_04: And that consists of understanding what is it that the customer wants to do, why they want to do it, when they want to do it, where do they want to do it, how do they want to do it, uh, how important is getting that thing done, and how uh uh satisfied are they with the current uh alternative ways of getting that do done.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_04: And then adding into that things like use cases and problem scenarios, doing your market research, your competitive research, uh, understanding where the technology is today and where it may be going in the future.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_04: Uh technology, by the way, is nothing more than the organization of knowledge for practical purposes.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_04: And if you organize it properly, uh that helps you do what's called innovation.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_04: And innovation is a sexy word today, like entrepreneur was about 10 years ago.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_04: Entrepreneur is just French for product success manager.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_04: And uh the innovation is just how do you do something faster, better, higher quality, or like in the case of an Apple Watch with style, and frequently you use technology to accomplish that.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_04: You may update, update, and change processes to accomplish that and so forth.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_04: So then you identify the personas in your product market strategy as to uh who you're going to be selling your product to, and that could be business to business or business to consumer, and with all of that together, you can then begin to identify your markets, your market size, your target markets, your total available market, and then develop the value proposition for your product.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_04: Why is it that someone should buy your product and your product positioning?
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_04: Where does it sit in the uh the state of mind uh of the customer?
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_04: And take a look at the opportunity and risk and uh bring to bear innovation, and now you have a list of product features, advantages, and benefits that map into the problems of what uh your customer, your persona wants to do.
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_04: That together can then lay out your product roadmap, your potential for sales and return on investment, and your long-term product portfolio.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_04: About uh 2015, over 7,000 companies in India were funded by startup venture capital groups or angel investors.
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_04: And according to my friend R.N.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_04: Prasad, who used to be VP of Emphasis in product management training, just about all 7,000 of them failed.
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_04: And I remember back in the early part of the last decade, up to roughly the present, uh, most people in India were more concerned about the price of the product and could care less about the product market strategy.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_04: And as a result, 7,000 companies went out there, raised a lot of money, and uh all went out of business, or most went out of business and lost uh those investments, uh, primarily because they failed to follow the five keys to product success that I teach, uh, which is uh available at Lovely uh uh University, uh professional university, and also at IIML as executive education programs based upon a book that I wrote uh that Wiley published uh in 2019.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_04: It's a short pamphlet on product success.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_04: Uh it's only uh 796 uh pages long, and it's called uh Product Success Toolbook and Product Management.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_04: Uh and it's available on Amazon as an electronic version, or you can take those courses, those seven-month executive courses, and get a uh get a certificate in it.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_04: So I think as a result of those 7,000 or so failures, uh a lot of people in India have gotten the religion that uh there's 130 different competencies you really need to have in your organization to have product success, and you really need to get professional training in order to avoid uh uh losing your investors' money.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_00: In this section, David makes a very interesting comparison and analogy between flying and product management.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_00: In his experience, he talks about the flying as a skill where one needs to look at various components.
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_00: It could be the wind speed, it could be the weather, and sometimes you need to trust the instrument to take decisions.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_00: He says similarly in product management, there are about 130 competencies that one needs to look at, and he talks about a structured methodology on building a product market strategy.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_00: He says only when you build a structured product market strategy with various tips that he outlines that a product can be successful, and in his book he identifies these 130 competencies and he talks about the need to build skills and become an expert in those competencies.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_03: So if I can just follow up on that, I think the notion of product success is very interesting because if you were to take the other side of the coin as far as product is concerned, it's you don't get success until there's discipline, right?
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_03: So you need product discipline to actually drive product success.
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_03: So if you were to take a step back and see how does one go about forming uh how does one actually think about what product discipline is in today's world?
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_03: How would you sort of frame that?
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_04: I would uh define that as a product development process that a company develops and then follows it over and over again, and after each product introduction or product end of life, uh they do a um an analysis of what went right, what went wrong, and what they can do better next time.
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_04: Uh this is taught in MBA school that you have to have mature processes in order to be more and more successful.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_04: Uh former client of mine, VP of product management, brought me in because they did not have a consistent product development uh process, and uh they had five failures in a row, uh, which resulted in the VP saying that uh the failure to have a repeatable process that's successful develops a culture of blame, or one party that uh is part of that whole process blames the other party for the product's failure when in reality they didn't have a mature process in the first place.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_03: When it comes to the process, it's also about being very collaborative with the folks around different uh aspects of the product development process, whether it is with your designers, whether it is with your developers, uh, whether it is with management.
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_03: So as somebody whose sole focus is on product success, what are some ways that what are some let's say that you're getting into a product role for the first time?
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_03: How what would be some what would be five, six steps that you need to take to ensure that you get some quick wins and get the ball rolling about how you want the process to play out?
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_04: Well, first uh uh to spend the three to six people months of effort necessary uh to put together the product market strategy that I described earlier, uh, and then uh define the processes you're gonna follow for the product development.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_04: A lot of uh failures occur, about 35%, by the way, of all new products uh fail in the marketplace, representing a waste of about a half a trillion to a trillion dollars a year.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_04: Is this notion popular by people here in Silicon Valley?
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_04: That's where where I'm at in uh uh in Las Ganas near near San Jose, that uh you need to um act fast, uh break things, uh fail fast, uh ready, uh fire aim kind of stuff.
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_04: And if you do that, your chances for success are significantly reduced, uh, even to the point that now people are running around saying we need to come out with a minimum viable product.
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_04: Well, there was a recent uh article in Medium by a former product designer at Apple, who now is a product designer at Google, and she says that Apple doesn't do that.
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_04: Apple comes out with a fully robust product that satisfies uh the market uh intensely, not the minimum viable product, which you get it's full of bugs that you might add stuff on to uh later.
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_04: Uh another example of that is uh there was uh the number three software company in the 80s by the name of Ashton Tate, and they had the DBase uh database program.
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_04: Well, they just contacted me recently.
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_04: The name has been uh brought back for an artificial intelligence server.
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_04: So I was researching Ashton Tate a little bit, and it turns out they shipped a bunch of products in a row that were full of bugs and were slow and generally didn't work, and they went from the third largest software company in the world to uh out of business within less than 10 years.
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_04: So I think you need to ready aim, uh, aim with your product market strategy, take the three to six months to put that together, define your processes, make sure that you have the information you need in order to make uh intelligent decisions, make sure that you clearly understand who your customer is, and make sure your employees andor your consultants have the 130 skill sets that I talk about in one of the chapters in the uh Wiley book that I mentioned earlier, in order to have product success.
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_04: And if you put all that together, it spells the word spice, S-P-I-C-E, which has nothing to do with spices in India, uh, but has everything to do with S stands for having a strategy, P is a repeatable process, I stands for having the information necessary, C is understanding your customer, and E is making sure your employees have the competencies or skill sets in order for the product or the service uh to be successful.
• 19:59
  SPEAKER_00: In this section, uh David talks about the fact that companies need to have a robust product development process.
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_00: He talks about the discipline of having a repeatable process, which is often not found in many firms that are building a product strategy and a product that needs to be successful in the marketplace.
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_00: He talks about the importance of understanding customers, having a strategy first in place, and then putting all the information and competencies that are required to make this product a success.
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_00: He belittles this whole notion of a minimum viable product and he says that the best product companies in the world really put all their effort into making a great product and ensures that there are no bugs even during the first product release.
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_00: So the importance of having a robust, repeatable product development process is critical for the product to be successful.
• 21:10
  SPEAKER_00: Uh David, uh you talk about uh the first ever memo written on written on product management by uh Neil McElroy, right?
• 21:21
  SPEAKER_00: Uh of PNG.
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_00: And uh you say that's like the Bible of product management ever done.
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_00: Uh you know, so what did that memo contain?
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_00: And can you tell me key tenets of that memo that is even relevant today?
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, uh uh McIlvaney wrote that uh memo in 1932 at the consumer products company, uh Procter Gamble, and it established the uh field called brand management, where the brand manager had full authority and full responsibility over the product line.
• 21:55
  SPEAKER_04: Uh by authority, that means they had the budget to pay for the market research.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_04: To do the five things I just described, to uh hire and provide the funding for the marketing department and the advertising, and uh had ultimate authority and responsibility for the profit and loss of that particular product.
• 22:17
  SPEAKER_04: In 1938, um, my research found that uh Dave Packard of uh uh Hewlett-Packard sat down with McIlvoy, and in fact, uh McIlvoy served on an advisory committee to Stanford, and Packard served on an advisory committee to Harvard, where uh uh McIlvoy had gone to school, and HP uh bore the notion of this product manager.
• 22:44
  SPEAKER_04: Uh unfortunately, one of the perturbations in the evolution of the product manager over the years is that their authority has been completely stripped away from them.
• 22:54
  SPEAKER_04: So they have full responsibility for the product, and the only authority they have is their ability to negotiate and mediate and persuade all the other members of the team to do the right thing so that the product is successful.
• 23:08
  SPEAKER_04: I've been on a campaign for the last 10 years or so to say give the authority back to the product manager, give them the budget, let them hire and fire the marketing department and pay for the market research that needs to be done and provide the funding for the advertising budgets and so forth.
• 23:29
  SPEAKER_04: And when you do that and you give the authority uh to the person that has responsibility, you can accomplish amazing results.
• 23:37
  SPEAKER_04: Uh an example of that is in the last uh uh years of the life of the Apple III, uh I was asked to take over as the uh business unit manager.
• 23:47
  SPEAKER_04: Uh they didn't want to call me general manager, so they preferred to call me the bum for short.
• 23:52
  SPEAKER_04: And that was after I advocated uh to the executive committee and to the president that uh I was the group product manager at the time.
• 24:00
  SPEAKER_04: I had full responsibility for the product, but no authority whatsoever.
• 24:05
  SPEAKER_04: Uh for example, there was a marketing guy that came over from uh Kodak and he was about to run a million dollars worth of ads for the Apple III and Great Plains accounting software in August of that year.
• 24:20
  SPEAKER_04: And I had a meeting with him and I said, Bill, please don't run those ads because we the product, the Great Plains software, is not ready yet.
• 24:29
  SPEAKER_04: So you're gonna run those ads in August.
• 24:31
  SPEAKER_04: The IBM PCXT, which is their PC with a hard disk drive, already had a hard disk drive on the Apple III, uh, of which I was the product manager to bring the first hard disk drive uh to market, which was a remarkable piece of technology.
• 24:45
  SPEAKER_04: It was uh immense size of five megabytes, and it was really, really cheap.
• 24:50
  SPEAKER_04: It was only$3,600.
• 24:52
  SPEAKER_04: And people said, What do I need this thing for?
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_04: Uh and uh uh so he ran those million dollars worth of ads.
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_04: People went into Apple dealers to buy the Apple III to do their accounting because at that time they were doing their accounting on mainframes through timeshare, which cost them a fortune.
• 25:11
  SPEAKER_04: And here they could do the whole thing in their own office on a personal computer.
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_04: And the salespeople at the dealers worldwide, uh they the dealers told me this, said, Well, the Great Plate software is not available yet, but it's on the IBM PC XT, so why don't you buy an IBM PC?
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_04: Well, I didn't have the authority to stop Bill from wasting that money.
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_04: Uh so I feel my division was solely responsible for the success of the IBM PC XT, and I need to send them a bill for my uh commission check.
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_04: Uh you got to give the product manager the authority, and I also have been running a campaign for the last 10 years or so to change the title from product manager to product success manager, and I propose that out of sheer frustration because I would go to a cocktail party, uh, meet a beautiful woman, and she would say, occasionally they would ask, What do I do?
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_04: uh, as if they had any interest.
• 26:11
  SPEAKER_04: And I said, Well, I'm a product manager.
• 26:13
  SPEAKER_04: She says, What's that?
• 26:15
  SPEAKER_04: I said, Well, I first figured out what it is a customer wants to do, and I do the market research and the competitive research and the identify the personas of the people that we're going to be selling the product to, and I put together the value proposition and the uh the product positioning.
• 26:33
  SPEAKER_04: I figure out the size of the market and what my target markets are going to be and how I'm going to reach those markets and calculate what the total available market is, which enables me to do a sales forecast and a return on investment.
• 26:46
  SPEAKER_04: And I bring to bear some uh you know innovation and new technologies so we can do it better better and faster and so forth.
• 26:54
  SPEAKER_04: And uh about uh an hour ago, she has already turned and walked away.
• 26:59
  SPEAKER_04: And I said, look, uh uh and I I composed a memo to that effect, which is on my website, spicecatalyst.com, that uh any of our uh listeners and viewers could go get.
• 27:11
  SPEAKER_04: And it describes this agony that you're not gonna you know get married and have 2.5 kids like you're supposed to.
• 27:19
  SPEAKER_04: And um if you could just uh uh boss, please change my title.
• 27:24
  SPEAKER_04: Uh can I change my title from product manager to product success manager?
• 27:29
  SPEAKER_04: Then when I go to a cocktail party, uh the women will know exactly what I do, and I'll probably be able to get married and have 2.5 kids.
• 27:37
  SPEAKER_04: And then if there's a PS at the bottom, boss, you can call yourself VP of product success, and uh I'll invite you to the wedding uh if you'll if you'll let me change my title.
• 27:49
  SPEAKER_00: In this section, David talks about the importance of a product manager having the complete authority right from the product development process to understanding the customer, doing the market research for it, looking at the market potential, looking at the competitive positioning, looking at the value proposition, building the communication, building a PL.
• 28:16
  SPEAKER_00: And he talks about the fact that the need for authority for the product manager end-to-end is very important if a product has to be successful.
• 28:28
  SPEAKER_00: And for the product manager to do this work, he has or she has to understand the competencies that he keeps talking about, saying that it's not just about communicating about the product, it's about understanding the personal, it's and understanding what the market size is all about.
• 28:49
  SPEAKER_00: He talks about what the market opportunities are, he talks about the importance of product lifecycle, he talks about the features, advantages, and benefits, and he says that if you don't have the authority, and if you don't give that authority to the product manager end-to-end, you rarely find products that can be successful.
• 29:12
  SPEAKER_00: So, David, um uh you uh you have in the book a very interesting uh you know anecdote uh where uh you know you talk about this uh you know Steve Jobs coming in and keeping a package in your table and uh you know saying uh you know uh the out of box experience sucks.
• 29:35
  SPEAKER_00: Uh so talk to us about what is this out of the out-of-the-box experience sucks and what was this whole feeling about product experience?
• 29:44
  SPEAKER_00: Because you talk about Apple being a total uh customer experience company.
• 29:48
  SPEAKER_00: So, what does this anecdote have to do with the total customer experience philosophy?
• 29:54
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, that anecdote is in my book, uh Building and Sailing Great Products, which is also available in India, and it's also been uh translated to Vietnamese uh in Vietnam uh because uh Vietnam is the fastest growing economy uh in Southeast Asia and has a highly educated technical workforce, and Apple and other companies are rapidly shifting uh manufacturing to Vietnam and to India to get under the uh uh clutches of the the Chinese uh currently.
• 30:25
  SPEAKER_04: So that was uh uh an anecdote of a former partner of mine who happened to have been the Apple II product manager uh at Apple, and uh Steve hired him and uh took an Apple II home and took it out of the box and tried to get it to work, even though he knew how to do it, just following the instructions, and he had a just horrible experience.
• 30:47
  SPEAKER_04: So uh Mike Connor told me the story of uh Steve walked to his office, threw the box at him, and said, This is a horrible out-of-box experience.
• 30:57
  SPEAKER_04: Now you compare that today when uh you get an Apple product and uh on uh uh Instagram and on Facebook, and I suspect on TikTok, when people when these first new iPhones come out or uh new iPad or something like that, uh people will video record their experience of unboxing it.
• 31:20
  SPEAKER_04: And it's like uh it's like someone gave you a new jewel or a wedding ring or something like that.
• 31:26
  SPEAKER_04: It's just a wonderful experience uh to open the box easily uh and not having to use your teeth and uh pull the cellophane or whatever it's called off the glass and turn the thing on and the thing says hello.
• 31:42
  SPEAKER_04: And um it's just a delightful experience.
• 31:45
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, you compare that to for many years, I thought I I I think it's still true, but I switched back from Windows to Macintosh around 2005 when I got to the point I had to have two Windows computers on my comp on my desktop at one time uh because I was doing a lot of multimedia production and uh it would constantly crash.
• 32:08
  SPEAKER_04: So uh I used to say that the normal Microsoft position is uh not bend over but reboot.
• 32:15
  SPEAKER_04: And I was constantly rebooting one computer while working on the other computer, and then I was always confused.
• 32:21
  SPEAKER_04: I had to click on the start button to stop the thing.
• 32:25
  SPEAKER_04: So where did this come from?
• 32:27
  SPEAKER_04: You have to click on start to stop, uh, and that's why you know people talk about branding, and all branding is is the promise of the product or the promise of the company.
• 32:37
  SPEAKER_04: It usually a company has a tagline that supports that branding, that promise.
• 32:42
  SPEAKER_04: So I've advocated that Microsoft should change its tagline uh to helping more people feel more stupid than any other company in the world.
• 32:52
  SPEAKER_04: But a lot of people blame themselves because they can't figure out where stop is under the start button.
• 32:58
  SPEAKER_04: So that user experience is critical.
• 33:02
  SPEAKER_04: Uh uh back uh then in 2005, if I found a bug and being a product manager, I always find the bugs because I push the software to its limits.
• 33:13
  SPEAKER_04: I would call uh Microsoft up uh and they would have horrible music on hold.
• 33:19
  SPEAKER_04: And uh finally when someone comes to the phone after 30 minutes, they hang up on you.
• 33:24
  SPEAKER_04: So you repeat the process again, then you describe the problem to them, and then they they uh escalate you to uh a guru that actually knows what they're talking about, and then they say, Okay, in order to uh fix your problem uh for this bug that you found there, thank thank you very much for finding this bug.
• 33:42
  SPEAKER_04: It's only$200.
• 33:44
  SPEAKER_04: So it's delightful to switch to a Macintosh.
• 33:48
  SPEAKER_04: Uh like the other day, um, I updated to the latest version of the Mac operating system, and my 49-inch LG screen uh when I booted up would stay black.
• 33:59
  SPEAKER_04: Uh I called or contacted uh LG, they blame Apple, and of course you call Apple and they blame LG, and I'm sure it was the solar flares that did it.
• 34:09
  SPEAKER_04: Uh but the Apple guy said uh worked me through, and it turned out the hub I was using was reducing the power level of the video signal to the monitor.
• 34:19
  SPEAKER_04: And when I unplugged my USB external drive, boom, the monitor came on.
• 34:25
  SPEAKER_04: And then I noticed that my Apple Care package, which enabled me to get that free phone call, expired on May 7th of 2023.
• 34:34
  SPEAKER_04: And that phone call was like on May 20th, 2023.
• 34:38
  SPEAKER_04: So they honored the uh uh the service, which is all part of that out-of-box experience.
• 34:45
  SPEAKER_04: And that's why companies around the world that put the customer first, uh, like Amazon, thrive while customers, at least back then, I understand Microsoft is doing a better job now, uh, that don't honor that, uh, tend not to stick around.
• 35:03
  SPEAKER_00: In this section, David talks about a very important concept in product management, which is total customer experience.
• 35:12
  SPEAKER_00: When you're thinking about a product and when you're thinking of designing a product, there would be a lot of features, benefits that would be designed in the product.
• 35:23
  SPEAKER_00: But when you're really thinking about total customer experience, it starts right before you choose a product to after you bought the product.
• 35:34
  SPEAKER_00: So when he talks about out-of-the-box experience, the concept of you've already bought the product, but the relationship does not end there.
• 35:43
  SPEAKER_00: The way you open the box, the way you feel about the purchase is all about the total customer experience.
• 35:50
  SPEAKER_00: So when you're thinking about products, the fact that you need to think about total customer experience, even in the little buttons that get designed, in the typeface, in the color palettes that you think about, everything is about total customer experience, and that's something that you need to keep in mind.
• 36:12
  SPEAKER_03: So I think you touched upon something very interesting, which is the notion of experience.
• 36:17
  SPEAKER_03: Uh so as a product manager, how should you be thinking about product experience or what encapsulates product experience?
• 36:27
  SPEAKER_04: Well, it starts with your out-of-box experience, uh turning the thing on, being able to do something useful with it quickly, as opposed to uh I keep hate to keep beating on Microsoft, but I enjoy it.
• 36:41
  SPEAKER_04: Um turning on, you know, um a Microsoft Office uh product, and it says, uh by the way, you're on a deadline and you're gonna get fired if you don't get that spreadsheet to your boss in 30 minutes.
• 36:54
  SPEAKER_04: It mics Microsoft out of its sheer um um I don't know what you call it, uh hatred for the customer requires you to update the software before you could do any real work.
• 37:06
  SPEAKER_04: Rather than saying, hey, would you like to do it now or do it later?
• 37:09
  SPEAKER_04: Uh and you notice Apple does that when you get an operating system update.
• 37:14
  SPEAKER_04: It asks you, do you want to do it now or do you want to do it tonight when you're hopefully you're sleeping?
• 37:19
  SPEAKER_04: Um so that lack of consideration of what the uh uh customer wants to do.
• 37:25
  SPEAKER_04: Uh I'll give you another example.
• 37:28
  SPEAKER_04: Uh back in 2018, I went to Singapore uh to give a speech at a product management uh festival, and then Cisco, who's my number one client worldwide, asked me to come to Bangalore and train about 20, 25 product managers.
• 37:43
  SPEAKER_04: So I needed uh to get to Bangalore from um uh Singapore, and I was also being brought over by uh Manypal University to give lectures on product management to places like uh Dell and Samsung and a few other companies, Phillips.
• 38:02
  SPEAKER_04: And um, so the thing that I had to do was to get from the hotel I was in in Singapore to a hotel in Bangalore.
• 38:12
  SPEAKER_04: Well, that sounds pretty simple, but there's a lot of decisions that have to be made.
• 38:16
  SPEAKER_04: Uh, what where what mode of transportation do I want to use from the Singapore hotel to the airport?
• 38:24
  SPEAKER_04: Because in Singapore you can take a taxi, you could take an Uber, you can take a shuttle, you can take the train, uh, you could hijack a car or a motorcycle.
• 38:35
  SPEAKER_04: Uh, and then you have to figure out how long it's going to take to get there so you can leave in the earliest amount of time.
• 38:41
  SPEAKER_04: Well, I like to get to the airport early because uh in my advanced age, I only like to fly business class, and uh that gives you free access to the business class lounge where the free food is.
• 38:54
  SPEAKER_04: Uh so uh I figured all that out, got to the airport, walked into the terminal.
• 39:00
  SPEAKER_04: If you've ever been to the Singapore airport, it's slightly larger than Manhattan, and uh you have no idea where to go.
• 39:08
  SPEAKER_04: And you're looking at the signs, and they got arrows pointing all over the place.
• 39:12
  SPEAKER_04: Uh reminded me of Heathrow of about 10 years ago.
• 39:15
  SPEAKER_04: Get off the airplane at Heathrow, there are no signs.
• 39:18
  SPEAKER_04: A typical British thing, you're you're supposed to be born with a map of Heathrow uh on your forehead.
• 39:25
  SPEAKER_04: So you um luckily there was an information desk straight ahead, and I walked up to the information desk and I said, Where's the check-in?
• 39:33
  SPEAKER_04: And I forget which airline I was flying on.
• 39:36
  SPEAKER_04: Uh and uh she pointed it as only a couple rows over, maybe about three or four miles.
• 39:41
  SPEAKER_04: Uh and uh I'm saying to myself, you know, my phone has an app on it called TripInt, and it knew at what time I needed to get to the airport and what flight I needed to get on and what airline.
• 39:54
  SPEAKER_04: And my phone also has GPS.
• 39:56
  SPEAKER_04: My phone knew where I was at and knows from the maps uh inside the airport of which counter to go to.
• 40:03
  SPEAKER_04: Why couldn't my phone wake up and just have a little arrow that says go over here?
• 40:08
  SPEAKER_04: Uh and I'll take you, you know, five minutes to walk there or whatever it may be.
• 40:12
  SPEAKER_04: So I mentioned that when I uh gave a talk at Samsung after I finally got into India.
• 40:18
  SPEAKER_04: And after the uh presentation, these the Samsung folks in in Bangalore write the Android operating system for uh Samsung's Android phones.
• 40:29
  SPEAKER_04: So the VP of product management says, wouldn't someone feel kind of weird uh if their phone woke up and all of a sudden suddenly giving them directions?
• 40:38
  SPEAKER_04: I said, no, not if the phone asks permission first, which is a notion that uh Samsung and uh uh uh Microsoft for years don't know.
• 40:49
  SPEAKER_04: If you ask permission, it's perfectly okay uh for Siri to tell you where to go.
• 40:54
  SPEAKER_04: Uh so I get over to that check-in, and she says, I'm sorry we're not checking in here.
• 41:01
  SPEAKER_04: You have to go to the other aisle, all the way in the other end of the terminal, and check in there.
• 41:05
  SPEAKER_04: So I wander down there pulling my luggage behind me.
• 41:09
  SPEAKER_04: I get there, uh, and um she says, uh, where's your ticket to leave India?
• 41:14
  SPEAKER_04: I said, uh my schedule hasn't been firmed up by Many Powell University.
• 41:20
  SPEAKER_04: I don't know when I'm gonna leave India.
• 41:22
  SPEAKER_04: She says, You can't come to India unless you could prove you're gonna leave India.
• 41:27
  SPEAKER_04: I said, Trust me, you got enough people as it is.
• 41:30
  SPEAKER_04: You don't need me in India, and I have absolutely no intention of staying there.
• 41:34
  SPEAKER_04: She said, sorry, you can't go unless you can prove you're gonna leave.
• 41:38
  SPEAKER_04: And I didn't know that.
• 41:40
  SPEAKER_04: My phone probably knew that because it might have read the fine print someplace that says you've got to have a ticket out to use a ticket in.
• 41:48
  SPEAKER_04: Uh so I said, Okay, where do I get a ticket out?
• 41:50
  SPEAKER_04: She says, go over to Singapore Airlines.
• 41:52
  SPEAKER_04: And I said, Where's that?
• 41:54
  SPEAKER_04: And pointed over there.
• 41:55
  SPEAKER_04: There's all sorts of construction going on.
• 41:57
  SPEAKER_04: So I wandered around, went all the way back to where the first ticket counter was.
• 42:02
  SPEAKER_04: There was another information desk.
• 42:04
  SPEAKER_04: They says, Oh, it's at the other end of this particular ticket counter.
• 42:08
  SPEAKER_04: Went all the way back, stood in line there for about 15-20 minutes, and uh the Singapore Airline lady says, uh, we don't go to uh Bangalore.
• 42:18
  SPEAKER_04: I said, Okay, well, how do I get a ticket to out of Bangalore so I can go to Bangalore?
• 42:25
  SPEAKER_04: And she says, Go to the uh uh travel agency in the other terminal, which is like in Chicago, uh as that's how far away.
• 42:34
  SPEAKER_04: And I wasn't gonna walk that far.
• 42:36
  SPEAKER_04: So I don't want to do that.
• 42:37
  SPEAKER_04: She says, Well, you can buy it online.
• 42:40
  SPEAKER_04: By this time, um, I was really hungry, and I looked up, and it was almost like a vision from God.
• 42:46
  SPEAKER_04: There was a restaurant on the mezzanine.
• 42:48
  SPEAKER_04: So I went up the stairs, sat down at the restaurant, ordered breakfast, and then proceeded to try to get on Wi-Fi because the SIM card I bought that was supposed to be universal and work everywhere didn't work.
• 43:03
  SPEAKER_04: And in order to sign in at that time on Wi-Fi at the Singapore airport, you had to get a PIN number, which they send you via text message, which is wonderful, but the SIM card doesn't work.
• 43:16
  SPEAKER_04: Um so I uh asked the uh waitress where where can I get uh you know the password to get onto Wi-Fi?
• 43:26
  SPEAKER_04: She says, at that information counter.
• 43:27
  SPEAKER_04: I said, the one at the other end of the terminal.
• 43:29
  SPEAKER_04: She said, Yeah, I said, that's the one I was just at.
• 43:31
  SPEAKER_04: So I left my stuff there, hoping nobody would steal it.
• 43:34
  SPEAKER_04: Went downstairs, crossed the terminal, got a slip of paper with the with the uh uh uh password on it, went back to the restaurant.
• 43:43
  SPEAKER_04: By that time my breakfast was cold.
• 43:45
  SPEAKER_04: I was tired of staring at the little ski screen of the iPhone, so I pulled out my iPad, and it was a completely different user interface that I had already learned how to use, uh trying to access Wi Fi at the Singapore airport.
• 43:59
  SPEAKER_04: Now and I'm the only person in the world that has these problems, probably.
• 44:03
  SPEAKER_04: But anyone who would think this through or observe by understanding what people traveling through the Singapore airport want to do, that they would all be going through these same problems.
• 44:14
  SPEAKER_04: So I finally got a ticket, finished my breakfast, went downstairs, they gave me uh a boarding pass to pass through security to go to India because I could prove I was gonna leave India, and then that's another hour-long story trying to get a refund from on that ticket, which I never used.
• 44:33
  SPEAKER_04: So that's what I talk about customer experience.
• 44:37
  SPEAKER_04: Uh and that's what Steve was talking about when he had this bad out-of-box experience.
• 44:42
  SPEAKER_04: Uh sometimes some products I get, I wonder if the uh senior executive staff ever bothered to try to use the product uh or any of the uh if they bothered to focus at all on uh user experience.
• 44:56
  SPEAKER_04: And again, those companies that do tend to survive, uh thrive, those companies that don't uh tend to go out of business.
• 45:05
  SPEAKER_00: In the example that uh David talks about, his experience of coming into India with the airline, with the airport, the key essence and the message that he passes on is to really look at customer journeys when you're really thinking product management.
• 45:21
  SPEAKER_00: Do you think of the service experience?
• 45:23
  SPEAKER_00: Do you think of the bottlenecks that the customers would face?
• 45:27
  SPEAKER_00: Would you have a problem with using the product?
• 45:32
  SPEAKER_00: Have you used the product?
• 45:34
  SPEAKER_00: And if you're somebody building the product and if you are somebody in senior management, there's always somebody to help you and you don't experience the problem or the pain that an ordinary customer goes through.
• 45:46
  SPEAKER_00: But when you really look at end-to-end journeys, you realize that there are several knots to make the experience phenomenal.
• 45:55
  SPEAKER_00: You need to really look at it from the time somebody leaves the hotel to the airport to the check-in to the lounge to finally uh taking a flight to uh to the country uh where he was uh you know landing.
• 46:14
  SPEAKER_00: Everything is an experience.
• 46:16
  SPEAKER_00: So when you're thinking of a product, it's not just enough.
• 46:20
  SPEAKER_00: If you think only of one particular component or a module, you need to think on it holistically, and that's the most important aspect of product management.
• 46:32
  SPEAKER_00: That's quite a long story, uh David.
• 46:35
  SPEAKER_00: I think uh it's quite an amazing uh set of uh I would say drawing up a customer journey uh with a beautiful storytelling uh capability, which uh got me uh you know very interesting images in my own head as you as you told the story.
• 46:53
  SPEAKER_00: Uh the question that I wanted to ask you was uh what was your learning with your Apple Wednesdays meetings?
• 47:00
  SPEAKER_00: How was it?
• 47:01
  SPEAKER_00: And uh when you really do these product meetings, uh how uh what are the key discussions that would happen there?
• 47:09
  SPEAKER_00: And there's an interesting uh you know story that you talk about where uh you know Apple II uh you know Apple III was supposed to be uh you know discontinued and uh you know uh you you went out and spoke to John Scully and you know got a complete uh independent uh you know responsibility to sell Apple III and uh so how do these meetings go there and what is it that they did right, which I think you recommend even for companies which build products today?
• 47:44
  SPEAKER_04: Well, I think one of the things uh that I talk about in building salary great products is uh one of the keys to Apple's success, and that is they have a set of values that they follow.
• 47:56
  SPEAKER_04: And that came true when um after uh Steve took the executive committee off to Pahara Dunes for an off-site retreat, and he was constantly campaigning to kill the product line because in his mind, uh in those days he felt the Apple III, which was a business computer, an office computer, would be a competitor to his beloved Macintosh, which in his mind he already had shipped, but physically it hadn't shipped, it wouldn't ship for another year and a half.
• 48:24
  SPEAKER_04: Uh he, by the way, uh uh the product manager for the Apple II told me a few years ago uh he wanted to kill the Apple II also for the same reason, uh, which would have resulted in the company going out of business and never providing the funding in order for him to finish the Mac.
• 48:41
  SPEAKER_04: But in those days, uh it was all ego uh for him.
• 48:45
  SPEAKER_04: And that was the bad Steve Jobs.
• 48:48
  SPEAKER_04: The one that came back to Apple after he learned his lessons, including uh being mentored, I found in my research for the book building as a products, uh uh was David Packard.
• 48:59
  SPEAKER_04: Uh and I knew David well because I used to handle his personal PR when I was in the corporate PR department at HP.
• 49:07
  SPEAKER_04: So um uh they killed the product line.
• 49:10
  SPEAKER_04: Uh John Scully called me into his office and said, What should we do about this?
• 49:15
  SPEAKER_04: And I said, What do you mean, we pale face?
• 49:18
  SPEAKER_04: And he had no idea what I was talking about.
• 49:21
  SPEAKER_04: So I'd explained the joke to him.
• 49:23
  SPEAKER_04: I said, Uh, you've heard of the Lone Ranger.
• 49:25
  SPEAKER_04: He said, Oh, yeah, I have.
• 49:26
  SPEAKER_04: And because there have been a couple Lone Ranger movies out, and there was a very popular television show in the United States in the 1950s, which dates me, uh, that um uh the Lone Ranger and his Indian sidekick, a Tonto, and when I tell people from India, I have to say American Indian, so not to be confused, uh, and they get surrounded by 10,000 yelling screaming Indians, and the white man that wears a mask and has a white horse named Trigger and has a uh a pistol with uh silver bullets turns to his American Indian sidekick and says, Tonto, we are surrounded by 10,000 yelling screaming Indians, and all they want to do is scalp us.
• 50:11
  SPEAKER_04: And Tonto says, What do you mean, we pale face, which was the uh slain term for white men?
• 50:18
  SPEAKER_04: Uh and I said, John, you canceled the product line.
• 50:22
  SPEAKER_04: You didn't ask me what I thought about it.
• 50:25
  SPEAKER_04: And he said, What do you think we should do?
• 50:27
  SPEAKER_04: I said, I think you got to give me the authority, commensurate with the responsibility.
• 50:33
  SPEAKER_04: And I told him the story of trying to get a promotion done and pushing it through eight levels of eight different groups through the division and into corporate and out to the sales force.
• 50:44
  SPEAKER_04: And I said, It's a lot like pushing a wet noodle.
• 50:46
  SPEAKER_04: And I couldn't affect sales on the floor of each dealer if that's the way things are.
• 50:51
  SPEAKER_04: Give me the authority commensurate with it.
• 50:54
  SPEAKER_04: So he says, okay, make me a proposal.
• 50:57
  SPEAKER_04: So I got about 75 people in the company to contribute information uh about the product line, and a core group of seven to twelve of us put together an 80-page business plan, uh, which covered everything to do with marketing, engineering, uh, support, service, uh, everything but sales, because sales would take care of itself.
• 51:19
  SPEAKER_04: We also covered manufacturing.
• 51:21
  SPEAKER_04: And on July 15, 1983, a day that will live in infamy, at least only in my own mind, uh, I presented this business plan uh to the Apple Executive Committee.
• 51:34
  SPEAKER_04: Notably absent was John Scully and Steve Jobs.
• 51:38
  SPEAKER_04: I don't know why, but I think uh Floyd Kwame, who is the vice president of marketing and sales, knew that uh uh while John knew a lot about sugar water, he didn't know much about uh PCs.
• 51:50
  SPEAKER_04: And uh Steve, just go play in your sandback box over here with uh the Macintosh and get out of the way, which is what the uh previous president was very successful in doing, is keeping his brilliant vision still in the company, but uh minimized his ability to screw everything up.
• 52:10
  SPEAKER_04: So uh put together a typical uh slide.
• 52:14
  SPEAKER_04: In those days it was an overhead transparency, which was called a foil because Boeing uh had, I think, developed the technology and did the typical balance sheet analysis, comparing different decision alternatives that the executive committee could make.
• 52:31
  SPEAKER_04: And then one of the people that was helping me was a lady by the name of Maxine Graham, and she had been on the Apple Values Committee a couple years earlier and said uh we ought to also compare those alternatives to Apple's values.
• 52:47
  SPEAKER_04: And uh so I did another spreadsheet with their help uh comparing the decisions.
• 52:52
  SPEAKER_04: And at a critical point of the meeting, Floyd Kwame, who later went on to be a venture capitalist at Kleiner Perkins and a science and technology advisor to President uh George W.
• 53:02
  SPEAKER_04: Bush, Floyd uh sitting in the middle of the room and he says, Dave, if we, the executive committee picks the option to that you advocate, which is let the market decide.
• 53:14
  SPEAKER_04: The market is smarter than all the MBAs uh at Apple at that time.
• 53:18
  SPEAKER_04: In fact, I've fired in my career more MBAs than I've uh hired, uh, or let the market decide, or if we shut the product line down right now, uh and a dealer calls you, what would you say?
• 53:31
  SPEAKER_04: I said, Well, if you decide to let the market decide, and you gave me uh authority commensurate with responsibility, I would say to the dealer that the company's decided to let the market decide if they want to continue to buy the product.
• 53:45
  SPEAKER_04: And then when sales taper off to the point in which it's not profitable, we'll let you know and we can uh end the life of the product.
• 53:52
  SPEAKER_04: Uh but if you make the other decision, keeping in mind uh everyone in the room, and in fact, sitting in the back of the room was Ann Bowers, uh, who was the VP of HR, and she was married to Bob Noyce, one of the founders of Intel, and she was instrumental in helping Intel come up with a set of values, and she was instrumental, I believe, in helping Apple come up with a set of values.
• 54:17
  SPEAKER_04: Uh so Floyd said, What would you tell the dealer?
• 54:21
  SPEAKER_04: keeping in mind that uh one of the values is good management, another one of the values is empathy for our customers and so forth.
• 54:29
  SPEAKER_04: I said, Well, if you decide to let uh the market decide, that's what I'll tell the dealer.
• 54:33
  SPEAKER_04: But if you decide to cancel the product line, Floyd, I'll give that dealer your phone number.
• 54:39
  SPEAKER_04: And everybody in the executive committee cracked up because the point is it would be uh the opposite to the values that the company exposed and told and talked about and told all the dealers, uh, and would be incongruent uh with that set of values.
• 54:57
  SPEAKER_04: So a couple weeks later, Ken Zerby, who came back from running Europe operations and returned to his role as uh chief financial officer, called me up and he says, I'm the garbage man for the company.
• 55:10
  SPEAKER_04: I get all the garbage divisions, and you're one of them.
• 55:13
  SPEAKER_04: Uh I hear you know a little bit about the Apple III.
• 55:16
  SPEAKER_04: Uh would you like to be the uh business unit manager?
• 55:19
  SPEAKER_04: And I said, Well, I love being the bum, okay.
• 55:22
  SPEAKER_04: And they gave me a$4 million budget, a headcount of 17 people, which means a secretary was equivalent to an engineer, which is a silly way of budgeting, but that's the way they did things back then.
• 55:34
  SPEAKER_04: Uh and uh that's what MBA schools uh taught, just do headcount, not what it costs.
• 55:40
  SPEAKER_04: And uh we went out and sold uh 25,000 Apple IIIs.
• 55:45
  SPEAKER_04: I forget the exact numbers, but I think we had about a$600 million profit in today's numbers, kept about a thousand to fifteen hundred uh uh Apple employees employed.
• 55:55
  SPEAKER_04: In fact, uh quite a few of them were MBAs.
• 55:58
  SPEAKER_04: And uh we didn't have the concept of the Boston Consulting Group of the Cash Cow at the time, where the thing was fully developed.
• 56:06
  SPEAKER_04: We just needed to make money off of it.
• 56:08
  SPEAKER_04: We had uh 40% margin, which is unheard of today, uh, and a lot of very happy people in offices and businesses uh worldwide that just loved the computer, which uh uh uh encouraged me to maybe run a cocaine test on the keyboard because people should love typing on that keyboard.
• 56:26
  SPEAKER_04: Uh and uh 11 months later I shut the product line down, handed off everything to uh Guy Kawasaki at the Macintosh Division so that the customers uh would have their data preserved, uh, and kept a lot of those people as loyal Apple customers uh to this very day, 30 some years later.
• 56:46
  SPEAKER_04: Uh so that the importance of values is is key.
• 56:51
  SPEAKER_04: And one of the things I found in researching for building a sanity great products is that uh if you go back to the original Fortune 500 list, which I think came out in 1966, and I knew many of these companies and knew many of the presidents or chairmen of the boards personally, because in 1970 I started, at the urging of an aerospace engineering uh professor, uh Wilbur Nelson, to start a supersonic transport uh support student association called FAST for Fly America's SST.
• 57:24
  SPEAKER_04: And before I finished my sophomore year, I had 15,000 members and 42 campuses across the country.
• 57:31
  SPEAKER_04: I was getting funding from over a hundred of those Fortune 500 companies, uh testified before uh Congress in my polyester suit, uh, went to White House cocktail parties and that kind of stuff.
• 57:43
  SPEAKER_04: And uh so my research for the book uh I put together a table that said uh for this company, did they have a set of values?
• 57:54
  SPEAKER_04: Did they follow those set of values?
• 57:57
  SPEAKER_04: And are they still in business today?
• 57:59
  SPEAKER_04: And about 300 of those 500 are out of business, and almost without exceptions, none of them had values.
• 58:07
  SPEAKER_04: Uh or like in the example of Volkswagen, one about 10 years ago, they expoused beautiful values on their website of caring for the environment.
• 58:16
  SPEAKER_04: Yet all the way up to the highest levels of management, they decided to defraud the world on their uh testing of the diesel emissions, uh, so that whenever you plugged in a uh air quality testing device, uh they would recognize it and change the numbers coming out of the tailpipe.
• 58:34
  SPEAKER_04: Uh and that's the result as a result of that, it costed billions and billions of dollars, including having to fund car electrification networks throughout the United States, and I think throughout the world, uh, and forced the company now.
• 58:47
  SPEAKER_04: I think they said by 2025 they are going to all electric cars on their entire product line to try to make up for the pollution they caused by failing to follow their values uh back, I think, around uh 2005.
• 59:03
  SPEAKER_04: So that was one of the things that that Apple taught me, and Maxine taught me, uh, is that the importance of values that also applies when people uh go out and look for a job.
• 59:14
  SPEAKER_04: Uh I put together a table thing, I wonder if this applies to me.
• 59:19
  SPEAKER_04: And I've been associated with about 25 organizations throughout my career, uh, some uh for-profit like HP and Apple, uh DataQuest and others, uh, and some nonprofits and some homeowners associations.
• 59:35
  SPEAKER_04: Uh so the first column is did they have values?
• 59:38
  SPEAKER_04: And if they had values, did they follow the values?
• 59:41
  SPEAKER_04: And was I happy being there or not?
• 59:44
  SPEAKER_04: And it turned out about uh 20 of the 25 either I quit or I got fired, uh, which made me happy as hell, sort of like a mercy killing.
• 59:52
  SPEAKER_04: None of them had values, or if they had values, they didn't follow those values.
• 59:57
  SPEAKER_04: But for those that mapped into my values and I mapped into that organization's values, uh, I was successful, I thrived, and I was happy.
• 1:00:07
  SPEAKER_04: And people that I've advised along those lines uh over the years, when they go out for a job interview, one of the first questions they ask of their potential employer, what is the company's values?
• 1:00:19
  SPEAKER_04: What are your values?
• 1:00:21
  SPEAKER_04: And in fact, a study just came out about employee satisfaction after COVID.
• 1:00:27
  SPEAKER_04: Uh, the number two thing after I think uh their salary is do they have a good boss that cares about them?
• 1:00:36
  SPEAKER_04: And that's very closely related uh to values.
• 1:00:40
  SPEAKER_04: So that was one of the things I learned.
• 1:00:41
  SPEAKER_04: Values are important, and if you got a startup, a new company, or an established company, one of the first things you should do is put together a set of values, discuss it with all of your people, and make sure everyone internalizes it and buys into it.
• 1:00:57
  SPEAKER_04: Because when you all go into the same room at the same time, like a product team, and you make a decision, if one person values his profit at everything's cost, and another person's values is uh customer satisfaction and customer experience, they are logically going to fight with each other.
• 1:01:17
  SPEAKER_04: Whereas everybody at Apple was about the customer experience.
• 1:01:21
  SPEAKER_04: Everybody at HP was about the customer experience, and that's one of the reasons that uh HP thrived and sales grew 20% a year every year from its founding in 1938 until 1998, when Carly Farina came on board as president and said we are no longer to follow Apple or HP way the HP values.
• 1:01:42
  SPEAKER_04: So values are key to the overall success.
• 1:01:46
  SPEAKER_00: In this section, David spends a lot of time talking about values.
• 1:01:50
  SPEAKER_00: Not often when we talk of product management, values are rarely given importance because values remain on the vision of the company and product is in the marketplace.
• 1:02:03
  SPEAKER_00: But when values and the product don't have a unison and there is no alignment, then most of the products fail.
• 1:02:13
  SPEAKER_00: That's a very important message that David is giving us.
• 1:02:18
  SPEAKER_00: So often when you really are thinking about a product and when you're shortlisting what kind of products you should be launching, what are the kind of features, the benefits that the product must have.
• 1:02:31
  SPEAKER_00: One way to look at it is to see it through the lens of company values.
• 1:02:35
  SPEAKER_00: If there is a company value, which is in the case of Apple or in the case of HP, was customer experience, then every product has to go through the same lens of customer experience, and then it could be a small feature, it could be an upgrade, it could be service, it could be support, it could be the distribution that you're thinking.
• 1:02:57
  SPEAKER_00: Everything is around the concept of the company value and the company value having close alignment with the product.
• 1:03:06
  SPEAKER_00: The other thing that he speaks about is even looking at your own values and then saying, you know, does the company's values align with my values if I want to work with this company?
• 1:03:17
  SPEAKER_00: So clearly I see this as a triad.
• 1:03:21
  SPEAKER_00: One is really the product, the other one is the company value, and about you working for that product.
• 1:03:27
  SPEAKER_00: So if you are a product manager, one thing you could look at is does my value align with the company value, and does my value align with the products that I want to build?
• 1:03:39
  SPEAKER_00: So, David, uh, you also have uh built a product called Productize, which is to really look at all the uh you know uh uh components of how you build uh you know world-class products in terms of various components that are there.
• 1:03:57
  SPEAKER_00: So, can you talk to us about what is productize and how can product managers use this platform and the software called Productize?
• 1:04:06
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, Productize is a plug-in on um uh JIRA, and a lot of software development houses use JIRA, and it enables you to identify the key elements of your product market strategy, your product development, uh, and your marketing, and create a uh take that framework, and there's some suggested frameworks in there, including the one that Spice Catalyst has developed, uh, and then uh attach to each of those uh elements uh all of the documentation and work.
• 1:04:39
  SPEAKER_04: So, for example, under personas, if uh you develop your personas uh and they're all done, then it'll show that that's at 100%.
• 1:04:47
  SPEAKER_04: And senior management can see where you are at in the development uh of the product market strategy, the product development, uh, and in the marketing of the product.
• 1:04:56
  SPEAKER_04: And right now it's a free plugin on Jira.
• 1:04:59
  SPEAKER_04: Uh through I forget the name of the uh the Jira open environment where you can get plugins.
• 1:05:04
  SPEAKER_04: And there are some articles on about it on my website uh in the blog under uh spicecatalyst.com with the links to that Jira plugin.
• 1:05:15
  SPEAKER_00: Often when you think of product management, you think of it as an art.
• 1:05:20
  SPEAKER_00: You think of it as how can how can you come up with some great ideas to build a product?
• 1:05:26
  SPEAKER_00: The fact that David talks about it being a science and adding process to product management through his product called productize is a very interesting way of looking at all the various stages of building a product and saying, Have I signed off in that phase and can I move to the next phase?
• 1:05:46
  SPEAKER_00: And have I covered all aspects of building a product through a platform that supports product management thinking?
• 1:05:56
  SPEAKER_00: Is I think a great idea.
• 1:05:58
  SPEAKER_00: The other question uh that I had uh was this whole thing about uh you know your doom apps, right?
• 1:06:05
  SPEAKER_00: I think you talk a lot about do maps.
• 1:06:08
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, can you walk me through what are these doom apps and how important uh you know I I think there's a whole chapter on do maps that I saw in the book.
• 1:06:18
  SPEAKER_00: So uh you know, in a brief uh explanation of how do you see doom apps and why is it so important in product development and product management?
• 1:06:29
  SPEAKER_04: Um it's built on the shoulders of two other uh pieces of work.
• 1:06:34
  SPEAKER_04: One is a professor at Harvard, has written a series of books called Outcome-Based Innovation, where the outcome is a thing that's important, uh, not the profits or whatever.
• 1:06:46
  SPEAKER_04: Uh and then a fellow that uniquely enough, uh Tony Ulrich at Synergim uh wrote a book, uh Jobs to be done, which builds on top of this outcome-based innovation.
• 1:06:59
  SPEAKER_04: And the kind of funny thing is when I was running the Apple III, he was the manufacturing engineer for the IBM PC Junior, which was the dumbest nailing naming of a product I've ever heard.
• 1:07:11
  SPEAKER_04: Uh if you want a PC, why would you buy a junior version of that?
• 1:07:15
  SPEAKER_04: Uh, and that contributed to being uh uh uh uh infantile more mortality uh because the product died.
• 1:07:23
  SPEAKER_04: And he thought about this subject and he says, Well, what job was it that the PC Jr.
• 1:07:29
  SPEAKER_04: was supposed to solve?
• 1:07:30
  SPEAKER_04: And there was no real job.
• 1:07:31
  SPEAKER_04: They tried to target the uh uh the education market with the PC Jr.
• 1:07:38
  SPEAKER_04: Jr.
• 1:07:38
  SPEAKER_04: And back then IBM was very arrogant.
• 1:07:40
  SPEAKER_04: They figured uh nobody ever gets fired by uh uh buying IBM, and therefore, if we IBM God says that um we are going to uh go into the education market with this IBM PC Jr., we will be successful.
• 1:07:56
  SPEAKER_04: Well, they weren't, so he thought about it and built his whole company about jobs to be done.
• 1:08:01
  SPEAKER_04: Well, in my experience that I talked about earlier, trying to get from Singapore to Bangalore, the job was to get from Singapore to Bangalore.
• 1:08:09
  SPEAKER_04: But there was a lot of things I needed to do in between, which I described earlier, uh, and that is what is it do I need to do?
• 1:08:19
  SPEAKER_04: When do I need to do it?
• 1:08:20
  SPEAKER_04: Why do I need to do it?
• 1:08:22
  SPEAKER_04: So, what is it do I need to do?
• 1:08:24
  SPEAKER_04: I need to get from the air from the hotel to the airport, blah, blah, blah.
• 1:08:28
  SPEAKER_04: Uh, when do I need to do it?
• 1:08:29
  SPEAKER_04: Tomorrow morning.
• 1:08:30
  SPEAKER_04: Why do I need to do it?
• 1:08:31
  SPEAKER_04: Because I have to give some speeches and do some training at uh Cisco and Bangalore.
• 1:08:36
  SPEAKER_04: How am I going to do it?
• 1:08:38
  SPEAKER_04: That means what are the different modes of travel?
• 1:08:40
  SPEAKER_04: Uh how am I going to find uh my ticket and how and check in and negate?
• 1:08:46
  SPEAKER_04: Um how important is it?
• 1:08:48
  SPEAKER_04: Well, I get fired if I don't get there and don't get paid.
• 1:08:52
  SPEAKER_04: And how satisfied am I with the current ways of getting it done?
• 1:08:56
  SPEAKER_04: Uh well, I ended up eating a cold breakfast, so I'm not very satisfied with that.
• 1:09:01
  SPEAKER_04: So that opens an opportunity, uh use case, a problem statement for someone to develop a product that solves all of those do's things that I need to do.
• 1:09:12
  SPEAKER_04: Uh but if I'm perfectly satisfied with the way things are, you have to, you don't have the value proposition to convert me uh from the way things currently are.
• 1:09:25
  SPEAKER_04: A classic example of that is ride sharing versus a taxi.
• 1:09:29
  SPEAKER_04: Um and the guy that invented uh uh ride sharing, uh uh a company called Uber, lived in Los Angeles.
• 1:09:38
  SPEAKER_04: And uh, if he uh raised his hand in the air uh to hail a taxi like we would do in Washington, D.C.
• 1:09:45
  SPEAKER_04: or New York, and I think in some of your uh cities in India, you could just raise your hand and a taxi or a motorbike would pull up.
• 1:09:53
  SPEAKER_04: Well, if he raised his hand in the air, though people will say, hey, put your arm down, your armpit stinks because there were no taxis running around in LA.
• 1:10:02
  SPEAKER_04: And then he thought about you know smartphones and the and mapping and the ability to contact independent drivers and not have to buy medallions and all of that kind of stuff.
• 1:10:12
  SPEAKER_04: So the notion of ride sharing uh got started because he had a problem.
• 1:10:17
  SPEAKER_04: Um if he lived in New York or Washington, D.C., as I did for a while, uh if you scratch your nose, ten cabs would pull up on the curbside.
• 1:10:27
  SPEAKER_04: Uh so you had to be careful to keep your hand away from your face, uh, unless you wanted a bunch of taxis following you around.
• 1:10:34
  SPEAKER_04: Uh so that that's what I mean by that.
• 1:10:39
  SPEAKER_00: When you're thinking of uh building a product, the concept of uh do maps that uh David talks about uh is quite an interesting framework.
• 1:10:49
  SPEAKER_00: I think the fact that you're thinking about the customer, what is the customer doing, what's the problem that they have, what are the challenges that they face in using the current uh service or the current product that they have, and therefore, what do you need to do and how can you do it better?
• 1:11:06
  SPEAKER_00: That is a very beautiful way of looking at a product, building an alternative product with a better value proposition, and therefore, you may be able to get a lot of premium for it.
• 1:11:18
  SPEAKER_00: And his example of looking at it through the lens, through the eyes of a doom is to say to get it done, what needs to be done and how can you do it better.
• 1:11:29
  SPEAKER_00: When you think product, think about do maps, and do maps provide a very interesting perspective of how you can think of building world-class products.
• 1:11:41
  SPEAKER_00: So, uh David, uh what does success mean to you?
• 1:11:44
  SPEAKER_04: Well, I think uh one of the keys is having fun.
• 1:11:48
  SPEAKER_04: Uh there's plenty of Debbie Downers out there that'll tell you that it's doom and gloom.
• 1:11:53
  SPEAKER_04: Uh so that's to be happy, like uh the Constitution of the United States or the uh the uh Declaration of Independence is life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
• 1:12:05
  SPEAKER_04: Uh so success is being happy, uh being uh feeling uh in my case, what I'm driven by is the highest levels of uh Maslow's uh hierarchy of needs, and that is uh the need to be wanted and accepted, and the need to accomplish something.
• 1:12:23
  SPEAKER_04: Uh but one of the things my heart bleeds about, and I tried to work on it, is the lowest levels of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, security, safety, food, health, and so forth.
• 1:12:38
  SPEAKER_04: And there are million billions of people in the world that don't have that opportunity.
• 1:12:43
  SPEAKER_04: So I think uh success also means trying to help those less fortunate uh than I being the uh son of a plumber from Detroit, having a chance to go to the University of Michigan and uh barely able to afford the uh the uh tuition, which was$600 for four years, uh, that uh a lot of people can't afford to call go to college anymore, or there's no jobs for people with that level of training.
• 1:13:12
  SPEAKER_04: So that's my goal in life, is uh if I can increase the level of product success, that half a trillion to trillion dollars that's wasted each year could be better use to use to help people uh and help the environment so that the earth can survive over the next hundred years.
• 1:13:31
  SPEAKER_03: What are some of the books that have influenced you the most over the course of your life?
• 1:13:37
  SPEAKER_04: Oh, I think uh Jeffrey, uh I forget his last name offhand, uh, Crossing the Chasm.
• 1:13:44
  SPEAKER_04: Uh David.
• 1:13:45
  SPEAKER_04: Jeffrey Moore.
• 1:13:46
  SPEAKER_04: Jeffrey Moore, yeah.
• 1:13:47
  SPEAKER_04: M-O-O-R-E.
• 1:13:49
  SPEAKER_04: And there's a revised version of that that's just came out within the last last five years.
• 1:13:54
  SPEAKER_04: And it's more on point.
• 1:13:56
  SPEAKER_04: I had the pleasure of learning directly from Jeffrey when I attended Apple University when I first joined uh Apple.
• 1:14:03
  SPEAKER_04: Uh and another one is um uh uh what's the book about great companies that uh was researched.
• 1:14:11
  SPEAKER_04: I forget the fellow's name offhand, Good to Great, I think it was.
• 1:14:15
  SPEAKER_04: Another one was uh Davidaugh's book about marketing high technology.
• 1:14:20
  SPEAKER_04: All of those principles.
• 1:14:21
  SPEAKER_04: Uh uh guerrilla marketing is another good one.
• 1:14:24
  SPEAKER_04: Uh another very interesting one is what would Google do?
• 1:14:29
  SPEAKER_04: It's all about the data, stupid.
• 1:14:31
  SPEAKER_04: If you can collect the data, you can make money off of it.
• 1:14:35
  SPEAKER_04: And a lot of companies uh have been moving in that particular direction.
• 1:14:39
  SPEAKER_04: So those are some of the books that uh have influenced me over the years.
• 1:14:44
  SPEAKER_00: Uh David, my next question is uh what would be uh one piece of advice that that you would give to an 18-year-old in a university today?
• 1:14:56
  SPEAKER_04: Figure out what it is that you want to do when you grow up and start striving in that direction.
• 1:15:03
  SPEAKER_04: You may not end up there.
• 1:15:06
  SPEAKER_04: For example, when I was about 12, I was sitting in my copper colored, since my dad was a plumber, uh, American Boaters Rambler, in the front passenger seat, and my mother uh had a master's degree in English from Wayne State University.
• 1:15:22
  SPEAKER_04: I had no idea she was so well educated.
• 1:15:25
  SPEAKER_04: Uh very few women, she was born in 1921, had a master's degree in anything.
• 1:15:31
  SPEAKER_04: And uh my grammar was terrible, and I hate her to this day for not improving my grammar.
• 1:15:36
  SPEAKER_04: But she did turn to me then and said, What do you want to do when you grow up?
• 1:15:40
  SPEAKER_04: And I said, I want to be an electrical engineer.
• 1:15:43
  SPEAKER_04: So I started down that path for a number of years.
• 1:15:46
  SPEAKER_04: I built uh televisions from kits, uh, radios from kits uh and things like that, built uh go-karts out of my dad's uh uh lawn boars that had fallen apart, uh, and drove it around in the street until the police chased me away.
• 1:16:03
  SPEAKER_04: So I cut off the front of it and turned it into a chair and drove it around in the backyard uh to my annoyment and pleasure of the neighbors.
• 1:16:12
  SPEAKER_04: And um I then next direction I went, because I was a pilot by then, was to go into aerospace engineering at Michigan, only to find out that they were interested in space, and I was interested in aviation, and they had a secret deal with Ohio State University, the Ohio State focus on aviation, and Michigan focused on space.
• 1:16:36
  SPEAKER_04: And I didn't like going into space because they don't have any air there to breathe.
• 1:16:40
  SPEAKER_04: And I was probably a closet uh claustrophobic person, so I didn't like a space helmet.
• 1:16:46
  SPEAKER_04: And uh and then I got involved in uh the fast droop and lobbying Congress and visiting uh aerospace engineering facilities like at United Technologies and at Boeing and others, and saw these highly trained engineers sitting at these battleship grade desks for World War II.
• 1:17:06
  SPEAKER_04: Now, this is early 1970s, these desks had already lasted, what, 25 years, and there were four of them facing each other, and they all shared one telephone.
• 1:17:16
  SPEAKER_04: I was saying, wait a minute, I thought I was supposed to be a valuable guy as an engineer.
• 1:17:21
  SPEAKER_04: That does not reflect something.
• 1:17:23
  SPEAKER_04: And I learned a lot about politics at the time, and I pretty much avoided politics up until then, and I said, wait a minute, politics is who gets what in our society, economics is the study of how they got it.
• 1:17:36
  SPEAKER_04: So if we boil that down, uh I decided to get involved in politics and public policy uh because that's where things were happening.
• 1:17:46
  SPEAKER_04: And uh that led me eventually uh to move my student organization's offices into downtown Washington, D.C., lobby Congress to get the space shuttle built, which I was successful on, and lobby Congress to uh help the United States uh move towards alternative energies and away from Arabian oil, uh which I failed on, uh, which is a lot of the same problems we have today.
• 1:18:14
  SPEAKER_04: And then it led me to uh Michigan, excuse me, to Minnesota, uh, where I ran the Environmental Balance Association and pioneered the field of environmental mediation, helping mediate the issues between economics, the environment, uh, and energy.
• 1:18:32
  SPEAKER_04: Uh and that enabled me to get hired by Hewlett-Packard and their corporate PR department to um help the company cite new facilities around the country, which were being opposed by uh no-growth uh advocates.
• 1:18:48
  SPEAKER_04: And I introduced word processing to the PR department because at the time the PR department was the only department in the company that knew how to type.
• 1:18:58
  SPEAKER_04: And that essentially was an internal product management job, and I was able to transition laterally, which is one of the good things about HP, into product management at uh HP on databases and user interfaces.
• 1:19:12
  SPEAKER_04: And then Apple recruited me because I was an HP trained uh product manager.
• 1:19:17
  SPEAKER_04: So follow what you find is fun and uh do things that uh make you feel satisfied, but have uh a moonshot to go for, so at least you got something in some direction uh to go for.
• 1:19:34
  SPEAKER_04: Uh I have uh four grandsons, and none of them have any um uh ambition as to where they want to go in the future.
• 1:19:43
  SPEAKER_04: Uh so as a result of that, they flail around, follow Ohm's law of uh path of least resistance, or uh the way water goes, as my dad taught me.
• 1:19:53
  SPEAKER_04: Uh all of this goes downhill without any aspirations uh to go someplace.
• 1:19:59
  SPEAKER_04: Uh but that generation is typical.
• 1:20:01
  SPEAKER_04: I have a nephew in the same uh uh age area, and I asked him, uh this would be about 15 years ago, uh, what is it what you want to do when you grow up?
• 1:20:11
  SPEAKER_04: He says, I'm sorry I can't think about it, it makes my head hurt.
• 1:20:15
  SPEAKER_04: What?
• 1:20:17
  SPEAKER_04: Pick something.
• 1:20:17
  SPEAKER_04: It doesn't matter what you pick, but at least have a goal, and then uh you can deviate from there.
• 1:20:25
  SPEAKER_01: Great.
• 1:20:26
  SPEAKER_01: Uh if you could invite four people for a dream dinner, who would they be in white?
• 1:20:32
  SPEAKER_04: Uh Dave Packer would be one, uh Barack Obama.
• 1:20:37
  SPEAKER_04: Uh have to come up with four, huh?
• 1:20:40
  SPEAKER_04: Uh Bill Clinton.
• 1:20:43
  SPEAKER_04: Um Zelensky.
• 1:20:48
  SPEAKER_04: Fascinating table.
• 1:20:50
  SPEAKER_04: Fascinating table.
• 1:20:51
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, it would not be Donald Trump.
• 1:20:54
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 1:20:57
  SPEAKER_04: In fact, when I was had my picture taken with a bunch of people, I think it was from uh Phillips out in front of the Phillips facility when I was in Bangalore back in uh July of 2018.
• 1:21:09
  SPEAKER_04: Um, you know, most people, I don't know if they do this in India, but most people say cheese in order to get people to smile.
• 1:21:16
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:21:17
  SPEAKER_04: I said I said Trump, and people were laughing all over the place.
• 1:21:20
  SPEAKER_04: It lasted for minutes.
• 1:21:24
  SPEAKER_00: Uh David, what is uh one piece of advice?
• 1:21:27
  SPEAKER_00: Uh you may have got lots, but what's one piece of advice that you really value and uh which you carry in whatever you do till date?
• 1:21:40
  SPEAKER_04: I I forget who said it, but uh was uh uh words to the effect of to thine own self be true.
• 1:21:49
  SPEAKER_04: And I think that's talking about have a set of values and stick to them no matter what.
• 1:21:55
  SPEAKER_04: Uh and I wrote that down on a piece of paper and I carried it around in my wallet for about 10 years when I was younger.
• 1:22:01
  SPEAKER_04: And every now and then I'd uh open up the wallet and realize I didn't have any money in there, but there was that saying, uh, to remind myself to thine own self be true and stick to your values.
• 1:22:13
  SPEAKER_04: We've got lots of examples of people out there that say one thing one day and then something the other day, like uh uh McCarthy, the uh uh Speaker of the House back in 2017 said nobody should use the debt limit, uh, which is nothing more than honoring what you've already budgeted for uh in order to affect uh uh budgeted spending.
• 1:22:39
  SPEAKER_04: And here we are six years later, and that's precisely what he's doing, which tells me this is a guy that has no values and is only going to do something that's expedient at that particular moment.
• 1:22:51
  SPEAKER_04: And I'm sorry, over the years, uh people that have no values follow in the footsteps of those 300 uh Fortune 500 companies that are no longer in business.
• 1:23:04
  SPEAKER_02: So, my final question, this is my final question to you, uh David, is uh what is something that you believe in that nobody else agrees with you on?
• 1:23:18
  SPEAKER_04: Oh I think there's probably somewhere as a neighbor of 30 to maybe as much as 45 percent of the voting public in the United States that actually believe Donald Trump is a good guy.
• 1:23:37
  SPEAKER_04: Here's a guy that has told over 30,000 lies in the four years that he was president, and they still believe everything this guy says.
• 1:23:48
  SPEAKER_04: He's worse than an attorney because you know how you can tell when an attorney lies, uh their lips move.
• 1:23:54
  SPEAKER_04: He's worse than that.
• 1:23:59
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks a lot, David.
• 1:24:00
  SPEAKER_00: Uh it was fascinating.
• 1:24:02
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I think uh the most interesting thing was the uh you know the vast experience, the great people you have worked with, uh, the number of years uh you know you've kind of been uh you know on the path to this uh you know this journey that you're doing.
• 1:24:22
  SPEAKER_00: Uh it just gave me vivid images of how it would have been to interact with those people in those days and still be relevant and your path to actually building something like this in product management is fascinating.
• 1:24:39
  SPEAKER_00: It was beautiful talking to you.
• 1:24:41
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks a lot for your time and really, really lovely having this conversation with you.
• 1:24:47
  SPEAKER_04: Thank you.
• 1:24:48
  SPEAKER_04: Appreciate uh for your putting up with me.
• 1:24:50
  SPEAKER_04: Uh I'd like to mention that uh in this day and age where algorithms and social media emphasize the viral of the thing going viral in order to encourage clicks.
• 1:25:04
  SPEAKER_04: So that uses the technology of wisdom of the crowds to spread uh uh fake information, rumors, uh virally.
• 1:25:15
  SPEAKER_04: Um and one of the things we try to teach folks is look at the credibility uh and the uh and the integrity of the source of that particular particular piece of information.
• 1:25:28
  SPEAKER_04: And uh I mentioned some political things earlier, and I can kind of say that uh I have some expertise in that area.
• 1:25:35
  SPEAKER_04: Uh I ran a governor's uh race in the last three weeks of the election in Minnesota uh and uh went from 20 points behind to 10 points ahead, and we won that race and swept the House uh and swept the Senate.
• 1:25:52
  SPEAKER_04: Um and I had a pollster at the time, a fellow by the name of Roger Ailes, uh, who later went on to file uh start Fox fake news.
• 1:26:03
  SPEAKER_04: And uh Roger gave me enough data so I could change the messaging uh in each part of the of the state of Minnesota uh for our speeches, our advertising, uh, our uh uh and so forth.
• 1:26:18
  SPEAKER_04: Uh that resulted in that 30% swing in just uh three weeks.
• 1:26:23
  SPEAKER_04: Uh then uh former Treasury Secretary of the United States, John Connolly, former governor of uh Texas, asked me to run his uh Minnesota campaign for president, uh, which I did, and we got four times as many votes for him in Minnesota than he got in New Hampshire.
• 1:26:42
  SPEAKER_04: Uh we got 4%, he got 1% in uh New Hampshire.
• 1:26:46
  SPEAKER_04: Uh so I've had some personal hands-on experience running political campaigns, uh, and uh therefore I'm fully qualified to criticize Donald Trump.
• 1:26:58
  SPEAKER_04: And you asked me what books I you should read, one you should not read is the art of the deal.
• 1:27:04
  SPEAKER_04: He didn't write it.
• 1:27:07
  SPEAKER_04: Much less follow it.
• 1:27:10
  SPEAKER_00: In conclusion, when you think product management, there are about 130 competencies that you can map yourself against.
• 1:27:18
  SPEAKER_00: And that's one way of benchmarking what you are good at, what are the skills you need to build, and how can you build it.
• 1:27:25
  SPEAKER_00: The second point he makes is to look at products in a journey perspective.
• 1:27:30
  SPEAKER_00: It's not just about the product that you're building, it's about the pre-purchase experience and the post-purchase experience.
• 1:27:37
  SPEAKER_00: Therefore, looking at it from a total customer experience perspective is holistically thinking about product management.
• 1:27:43
  SPEAKER_00: The third message that he talks about is to look at all aspects of product management.
• 1:27:49
  SPEAKER_00: So it's not just about the feature, it's not about that one single idea that you're talking about, but it's about all the components need to work in a connected manner, and you need to look at it from a competitive benchmark, you need to look at it from what is really the value proposition, how do you differentiate yourself, what's really the market opportunity, and finally, product management is about looking at it holistically and not leaving it in one single silo.
• 1:28:18
  SPEAKER_00: Therefore, you need to think across the functions of the company.
• 1:28:21
  SPEAKER_00: So, if you're a product manager, you need the complete authority in not just building the product, it's not about designing the product, it's not about managing the product, but you need to have the ability to manage it like a business owner.
• 1:28:36
  SPEAKER_00: I think that is really what true product management is all about.
• 1:28:43
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks for listening to this episode.
• 1:28:46
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• 1:28:54
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