More 2 Marketing

Susan
More to marketing. Welcome to modern marketing. The podcast explores marketing, product and everything business. I’m your host today, Susan Walsh, and today we’re going to go and dive into a really interesting topic, which is what makes great products great. And I have. A very special guest. Today I have an acclaimed author, Jeff Callen, who has written the book. What makes great products great question mark. Jeff has a proven track record of bringing innovation to life and he does this through his ideas and they have helped products for over nuance upon millions of customers. Over the years, Jeff has accumulated a huge wealth of knowledge to enable him to create award-winning business strategies and business plans. Welcome, Jeff, tell me a bit more about you and your background.
Jeff
Susan, thank you. Yes. So I’ve been working in product management for about 25 years, which means basically I have 50,000 hours of BM experience. I’ve worked with, worked with everyone from pre seat startups to Fortune 100 companies. In 2017, I left a 20 year career. At the mobile carrier here in the US, Sprint, which is now part of T-Mobile and started my own company Tightwire, doing product management consulting, working with companies to build and scale their products. During my career, I’ve taken multiple products from ideation to. Mail. I’ve generated more than a billion dollars in bottom line value for the partners that I work with, and I usually tell people that I am comfortable taking ideas from zero to one or from 1 to 10X. Last year I published my book what makes great products great, and I took those 50,000 hours of experience. And distilled it down to 400 pages of product management cheat codes. As far as from a personal standpoint, I live in Overland Park, KS, with my wife Lori. She’s a college professor and my 2 cats, Reggie and miles. I’m a big sports fan. I’m a big fan of live music. I’ve been running an Internet radio station called Musical Justice since the year 2000.
Susan
Definitely been around for quite a long time in the product space and also getting involved in many different things there too. Thank you so much Jeff for sharing. I think one of the biggest compliments I can give you is when I used to work for a telco we used to watch what you were doing at your telco. Because they had such great innovative ideas in the market and we’re really trying to push boundaries. So I’m I’m very well aware of your work, which is why I’m so excited to have you here today and also been talking to you for a while now too, outside of here. But let’s talk more about your book and all those hours. Of time you distilled, which couldn’t have been easy. So what did inspire you to write your book? What makes great products great?
Jeff
Well, I had a college roommate, Mark Weingartner, who was a New York Times best selling author. My wife as an academic has published 6 books of her own. And so you get to a certain point in your career when you start to think about things like legacy. When I started my consulting business, I’ve been, I’ve been doing a lot of coaching. And that’s really a tough thing to scale, so. They say write what you know, and I took those 50,000 hours of product experience and tried to turn them into a scalable knowledge product a a book.
Susan
I think the biggest thing about this book for me is really about how versatile it is. Do you want to talk about how you came about the structure you did for this book and why?
Jeff
Well, yeah, it was one of those things. I work a lot with early stage startups. So I think there’s really three different types of reader who would be interested in what’s in the book if they’re an aspiring product manager and maybe they’d like to learn, but they don’t really have the luxury of the time. To get a bunch of experience they can learn from my mistakes, my. Successes, if they’re a more experienced product manager or product leader. Basically you know, sometimes you get into this cycle where you’re you’re missing your metrics, you’re missing your deadlines. You never have enough resources, you have unrealistic timelines. You. It’s I, I think good to have. A book to refer back to that’s been through the war with you and to be able to maybe confirm some things that you’ve experienced. And then there’s this a third tier, which is executives who maybe aren’t product people, but they they have a sense that something’s going on in that area of the business and they want to understand that that role better. They want to get insight into the role. And so those are the really. The three target audiences I think for the book.
Susan
And I think one of the things that I love about the book. As well is there’s so. Many lists in there that you can just pick up. And wherever whatever stage you’re at in the product life cycle, where if you’re in the ideate phase, you’re further down. You want actually launch something. There’s there’s sections within the book that can help you along the way, like one of my favourites is the go to market section where a lot of product people may fail to see the relationship they need to have with marketing to help get their product. Out there for the right messaging, I think just having all of those tips and tricks, your experience all rolled up into this great book really do help.
Jeff
It’s one of my favourite chapters because it’s actually based on stuff that I’ve done in the real world. There’s a 58 point checklist for a go to marketing checklist that has a whole. A whole bunch of different categories of ideas and things that you need to. Maybe they don’t need to be done for every product, but you should at least pause for a SEC. Again, think about. Consider it and then maybe you don’t need a sales contract for this particular product launch because you’re doing it as an online sale, but you should at least consider whether you need these things before you just dismiss them. So I think having a checklist gives you a more consistent. Product launch it. It allows you to capture things that may be screwed up a previous product launch so you you don’t make the same mistake over and over again.
Susan
Exactly. And that that’s why it’s just a handy resource. Now let’s go into one of my favourite questions. I’ve wanted to ask you is how do you believe the concept of great products has evolved over time and what role does innovation play in maintaining the relevance in today’s market?
Jeff
That’s a really interesting question. In many ways, it hasn’t changed that much. Great products engage us, they deliver value and pleasing ways to us. But if there was one way that it really has changed, I think significantly is data we know so much more about our customers, especially if you’re selling a connected digital product, we can know when they use it, we know where they use it and we know how they use it, what parts of it they use it. We know when they stop using it. We have so many opportunities to create. Feedback loops and leverage that to improve the users experience. There’s an entire chapter in the book about data and understanding how they’re creating narratives using the products data so that you can use product data to drive decisions, to drive strategies, to drive tactics within your organisation. There’s a downside to how products have evolved, and I think one of the big ones is that attention spans have gotten much, much shorter. The white noise that we deal with in our everyday lives can sometimes be deafening. There are so many options out there to choose from with generative AI it’s getting easier and easier to create, and that’s adding to the white noise in the in people’s lives. How do you break through that noise? How do you engage and deliver value in a distracted world? I mean, those, those are some questions that I think. Are real challenges for product people.
Susan
Agree. And I think a lot of them when it comes to data as well as how do I use this data, how do I actually merge it together and use it to actually get something meaningful to create insights and maybe change out of and do some pivot points wherever it is with the product. I think there’s a lot of gaps in some skills. For the right people to bring in to be able to find that out for you, to help you along that journey.
Jeff
Right. It’s that’s definitely true you have. Ohh. Every product has raw data that they collect and you need someone who’s going to add some structure to that data. That’s usually an analyst or a data scientist that’s adding structure to the information, taking it from that raw data stage into something that is just more structured information. Product manager comes in, I think, at the next step which is taking that information and concerning converting it into insights by adding context, adding business. College, you know, if you go to a lot of data scientists and they’ll tell you when this went up, this went down and then you asked the next next logical question, which is why and they’re like, I don’t know, I I’m only trained to know when this goes up. This goes down. You have to talk to stakeholders. You have to talk to business owners in order to understand the context that helps you take that information, turn it into insights that you can then use to evolve into strategies and tactics. The execution of those tax. These. Turns into new signals that come into the front end of the model, and it’s just a big loop.
Susan
I think one of the biggest distractions that I see happen quite a lot is you have a senior stakeholder who believes they are the target audience of this product or service and they don’t listen to the data. That’s probably one of my biggest pet peeves, having seen that happen over and over again and you’re laughing at me because you’ve probably seen it too.
Jeff
Lean it 2.
Susan
In those instances, is there anything that you can recommend for product owners and people to be able? To. Push through the right data to be able to get through to those senior stakeholders are just so stuck in their own mindset.
Jeff
The one of the one of the things that you have to do is stand by the data. It’s it’s not always easy when you have a senior leader who is a data denier. But. One of the big issues really is. You you have this data, if they’re, if they’re going to deny the data, then ultimately you’re gonna end up wanting to or ending end up having to do what they want to do or you’re going to have to leverage the data to convince them to give your. Your idea is a try, it’s. A sticky situation for any product person.
Susan
It definitely is, and I think sometimes it’s one of those ones where you have to just ride the wave, go go with where? Unfortunately, you know where it’s probably going to end up going, but have a pivot plan so that as soon as the first round of data comes in to prove you’re right and they’re wrong. Which is my favourite things. Then you can quickly pivot as fast as possible to be right on track.
Jeff
So do you. In Australia, do they have a the show myth Busters?
Susan
Yes. When? When it was around, yes.
Jeff
Adam Savage is one of my favourite followers and he has a YouTube channel and about the sometime within the last month he had posted the video. And the the the. Audience asked him a question. And the question basically was about the relationship he had with his co-host Jamie Heideman and. He he said that they were very they had a very contrarian. You know, if one said black, one said white. And this was literally the story they were trying to do to shoot something. They needed something that would reflect light. Adam suggested a white mess, Jamie said. I should I say we should use a black mesh and Adam realised that the world was going to answer this question for him. He didn’t need to prove Jamie wrong because the world was going to prove him him wrong. So he they went ahead and they got the black mesh. He didn’t have the argument. The world proved Jamie wrong and they went on with the white mesh and and continued on with the project, sometimes with senior leaders. That’s what you end up having to do. Let the world prove them wrong. Don’t take it on as a fight because you may not have the political capital organizationally to do it anyway. And so. Just let the world prove it wrong.
Susan
I love that example. It’s definitely a a really good way to look at it that the what wasn’t going to end and there was still time within their time schedule as well to be able to amend for it too, but not taking anything to heart. And I can I can see a lot of people sometimes will do that. Because their heart and soul is in what they’re delivering and creating, so it’s another great tip as well to be able to step back and look at it just rationally and go, let’s make sure we can try and put some time into this to do this test if we need to, whatever it. Be so that they don’t feel that it’s a reflection on them. But they do have. A backup plan for when they know, inevitably, in that example it was, it was not. Going to work. Fantastic. Now there’s a whole pile of different insights, chapters, sections within your book. Can you share a few of your favourite principles that you cover within it?
Jeff
Well, one of my one of my favourites is the. Opening story. Basically we talk about the fact that products are everywhere you look and I’m gonna ruin life for some people who don’t see it this way, because once you, once you have. The veil taken away from your eyes and see the world the way I see it, you won’t be able to see it another way. So let me explain what I’m. What I’m talking about in the room where our listeners are, there’s probably a light switch someone. Had to make product decisions for that light switch is a a single up and down switch. Is it 2? Is it a 2 + a slider 2 + a swivel? Is it white plastic, brushed metal, wood, Mickey Mouse? I mean there’s all sorts of different. Things just for a simple light switch so that when you go into your local hardware store and you’re looking at the wall full of options, that the option that you’re looking for that meets your needs is there. When you go. Out and look at your yard. The grass in your yard was originally a probably a contractor grade seed grass is a product. If you don’t believe grass is a product, go to a golf course and ask them if they think grass is a product because they have rough grass. They have grass for the greens. They have grass for the fairways, three different types of grass in on one golf course, more probably even more. So the idea that products are everywhere you look when I go to a concert, I mentioned that I like music when I go to a concert, I not only experience the music, but I experience it as a series of product decisions. You know, you go to. An EDM show and there’s lights ablaze. Bright colours all over. You go to that same concert venue and see Bruce Springsteen in the E Street Band and everybody’s wearing black. It’s starkly lit and the focus is on the boss. And so everywhere you look, people are making decisions about your experience, your product, how they, how they’re going to craft that. Experience. It’s everywhere. That’s.
Susan
Yeah. No, exactly. You’re 100% right. It really is. I, I actually have another analogy that I kind of analogy that I kind of do with my team and that is marketing is everywhere. So I I literally took one of my team members out and I was just. Showing. How even a simple sign to go to the train station has all these elements within it that has helped make the decision for what that? Sign looks like. And I I I do this exercise quite regularly with them, they probably tear their hair out a bit with me when we go to the shops to pick up some like fruit or something. But I find it’s it’s a really interesting exercise to do to see the evolution over time as well, with some of those decisions that are made. And that’s I’m I’ve been coming from more from a product, sorry, a marketing lens where you’re now talking about from a product decision making about all those little pieces with it. So I absolutely love that.
Jeff
Another thing that I talk about in the book that I think people would find interesting, I’ve worked with a lot of cutting edge technology over the years and I’ve ended up burning a lot of resources on products that were really ahead of their time because the OR suffered from the fact that the tech wasn’t fully. For example, I use predictive speech to text platforms 20 years ago that have evolved to what we know today as LM’s, but 20 years ago, they weren’t ready to do the things we wanted to do with them, so knowing that as a concept I came up with and I talked about in my book. Something called the WOW now matrix the wow bout. Now matrix is a two by two matrix with the wow factor on one axis and the now factor on the other axis. And basically I define wow as the concepts innovation value or the concept concepts value in. So I define now as how quickly it can be delivered. Does the tech exist in the working form today it does it require some R&D and tech advantage advances to be useful? Does it require a lot of resources to develop or is it a quick build and so you put that on a? High, low basis and then you have you know what you’re really looking for is high wow high. Now factor which is what I call the build Quadrant in the model. You have low wow high. Now factor, which is we’ll consider it because maybe the wow factor can be elevated, but it’s ready to go now. Then you have the high wow factor, but the low now factor so high wow low now, which is basically means we’ve got to learn more. We have to develop this, maybe invest more in the technology and then you’ve got the bottom quadrant, which is low, wow low. Now you just park those ideas. Maybe they change over time. Maybe something come comes with which will shift it into one of the other quadrants, but for now it’s a park and I think using that lens to evaluate cutting edge technology and products that you can build with it is a pretty useful way of deciding. Are we really ready to go with this or not? And I wish that I’d understood this concept early in my career, when I was doing some of these projects, because there was no way that they were ever going to be successful because the tech just wasn’t.
Susan
I think it’s a great tool and resource also to use in workshops, so if you’ve got having those big innovative sessions about what are we going to do next, what’s the next big product on our road map or how can we improve what we’re currently got having that as the template could definitely help making some of those business decisions and focusing on the resources as well.
Jeff
Yes, absolutely.
Susan
What are some of your key insights when you were doing all your research? What did you discover that was very interesting? Like, are there any common traits or characteristics that you found amongst when there’s a successful and an unsuccessful product? What did you learn along the way?
Jeff
Great, great question. How do you tie together coke, apple? Legos BMW 3 Series. You got sugar? Water. You’ve got iPhones, you’ve got plastic blocks and a luxury automobile, and there are some basic things that they all deliver value in ways that are are pleasing. They deliver value in ways that engage us. But I think one of the most important things that they all do is how they manage the end to end customer experience. I talk a lot about this in Chapter 24 in the book the Customer Journey and Understanding that a customer experience is your product on a timeline. They start out with. Maybe they figured out that they have a problem. They start to do a little research around it. They narrow the field of possible possible alternatives down to a handful. They pick one, they go through a purchase, go through an onboarding, go through a first use. Maybe at some point they have an interaction with US support team. They use the product for a period of time, they get to the end of that period and if it’s a a product that enables repeat purchases, hopefully they go back to the purchase part of that timeline and not back through to reevaluate. And so on, because they’ve you’ve built loyalty over the. Well, if you think about how that that’s how the customer experience is on a timeline. But if you think about how the most companies organise things, they organise in silos. So the marketing team is going to handle that early discovery and communication piece and then you’re going to have maybe a product team. That focuses on delivery of the product and then you’ve got support teams and loyalty teams and and all these different groups, but they’re each kind of. Handling their own silo of work and then tossing the dough the customer over the wall to the next team and it creates a very disjointed, fragmented experience for the customer. Well, I think that the best. Product companies the best products have that as a common thing where you can see that there’s this consistency of experience as you move through from stage to stage from touch point to touch point in the expert. Yes. Does that makes sense?
Susan
It does completely, and I think I’ve got an example I. Can add to this that you can talk. Through so Tesla. The brand, the man behind it, innovative, everyone thinks the major quality, but it’s ahead of its time. In some ways that very forward thinking, very futuristic, looking at how to use energy in a different way for a car vehicle. Now you an equal price tag on this as well. So we’re we’re talking towards luxury and here we’re not talking bargain basement car. So there are a lot of expectations then when you think of what you’re going to get, not just as the car but as the experience that goes with the car. And a lot of the times, unfortunately, sorry to this, but. Elon, but the customer service is not there. You don’t get messages about when your vehicle is. It might appear in the app. That’s a mill of the ocean for six months. You don’t even know it’s ready for pick up. Then there’s service pickup isn’t exactly stellar because it’s just an assumption. You know how to use this new vehicle with new technology. And you can just drive off like a normal combustion engine. Where in a lot of cases you may need a little bit of help to set the settings or whatever it could be. So again, just an example here of when the silos break, you’ve got a quality product that’s had so much engineering, product, research, development, technology advancements put into it. But they’re throwing it over the brick wall. It’s failing when it comes to consumers and really just making the brand as pristine as it should be.
Jeff
So Elon is. Of an interesting. Example here because he’s I think on steroids. One of the problems that I frequently see with early stage startups, which is that the the founder is the first product manager and so. If they don’t ever evolve from being the first product manager into managing the other aspects of the business. It can be a a limit to the company’s ability to grow and that. CEO has all sorts of other things that they should be focused on. I mean, the product is the most important investment that that the company makes because if you don’t have a good product, you don’t have customers. And if you don’t have customers, you don’t have a business so. I understand wanting to be very hands on from his perspective, but he I my guess is he doesn’t empower other people, other stakeholders to give him feedback. He he reminds me a little bit of an old twilight zone. Episode where there’s a little kid and every time anyone contradicts this little kid who’s got superpowers, he makes them basically disappear. Here and so my thought is that Elon might be a little bit like that. If you give him bad news, he’s just gonna make you disappear. So he ends up being surrounded by a lot of people who who share his vision but maybe share his blind blind spots too.
Susan
Yeah, and that’s probably one of the most important things to understand when you’ve got those silos and you’re trying to break them down and you identify it is not always looking for people that are like minded, but people who will challenge and people who will see the data and put it forward. And as you said earlier, stand behind it.
Jeff
Exactly. Diversity of experience creates a range of empathy in the development process and and some of the most. Some of the best teams are also the most diverse teams and they they come together and there’s the sum of their parts. Is greater than the individual pieces. Because they bring all this different perspective, you know it’s it’s a. It’s an interesting conversation to have the impact of diversity of team on quality of product, quality of experience, empathy for the. Customer all of those things are a a very significant part of what you get when you have a diverse team.
Susan
No, I definitely agree there and I think that’s probably one of the other insights you found along the way too. So there’s always going to be challenges. So how do you address the challenge of staying competitive in a constantly evolving evolving market, particularly when you think of technology and how much has changed just in the last five years?
Jeff
Well, first of all, you’ve got to do the work to stay informed and to just be knowledgeable about your ecosystem. It’s important to understand from a competitive standpoint that there are people out there who are always trying to take it away from you. There are always people who are out there wanting to crush you and you know they. The so the if there are people out there who want to take what you have away from, you crush you and leave you a broken shell of a human. The there’s two things that you really need to know. You need to know why are they buying from your competition and how can you meet that need better. So in the book I talk about something. I call it four Y’s and the four Y’s are four reasons why. Customer might purchase from you the four Y’s are the functional Y, the social Y, the emotional Y, and the logical Y. So let’s break each one of them down. The functional Y is really. Table stakes it’s does this product or service do what you need it to do? If you if it doesn’t meet that basic why then any of the others are not really relevant. The second why the social why is? More like. I buy this product because I associate with a group. That also buys this product. So think about things like sports teams sport, you know, you’ve if you’ve got a sports jersey in your closet, if you’ve got a concert T shirt in your closet, those are things that you bought because you saw yourself as a person who likes that team. Manchester United or or The Rolling Stones and so you buy to be part of the. The third reason is what I call the emotional why the emotional why is I buy this thing? Because it makes me feel a certain way. So take McDonald’s, for example. They sell, they literally sell a product called a Happy meal. You buy the happy meal because you want to be happy. So. Then you’ve got the. The fourth reason, which is the logical why the logical why is is. More increasingly important, because the logical why is I go to Amazon and I sort on review, view the review or I sort on price and I’m basically leveraging data to make my decision for me. I’m buying the most highly reviewed. Or the most frequently reviewed, or the the cheapest, or the, you know, most expensive. Ohh.
Susan
Fastest delivery for me.
Jeff
Fastest delivery. So all of those reasons are reasons why somebody would buy a product. So if you understand. Your reason it I think it sets you up with being more competitive against people who are trying to to take it all away from you. One of the other techniques that I use when I’m working with my teams is what I call a pre mortem. So pre mortem is the idea that. Imagine that you and I are having a conversation about the business that you’re in now, but we’re five years in the future and we’re looking back and it failed. Having a conversation around what do we think the reasons are that this business failed so that you start to anticipate potential problems before they occur and make sure you have a plan in place to deal with them. So it it, it almost always uncovers things. That are important for that business to deal with and and we very frequently are are so focused on what? I call the. Happy path the and convince that it’s all gonna fall in line for us, that we ignore the things that could potentially go wrong. You’ve got to have. A plan for it.
Susan
100% I think another document that I do quite a lot myself is also that the risk assessment, the risk of what could go wrong, and then how is it going to be mitigated and do I? Have to do something now about it or not. Not so a bit more on the the very negative, but it also helps when I’m working with product people and myself being a product person of did have I created everything I needed to to get as close to success as I can do that I feel confident.
Jeff
Right. So that reminds me of a story that I frequently tell to the startups that I work with. It’s the idea that when you’re creating a prototype, you want to you want to create the prototype such that it answers the most high risk questions that you or the the. The. The areas that you’re most concerned might fail again, like we talked about earlier with the pre mortem technique when you’re building this prototype, the analogy that I use is imagine that your product is we’re going to teach gorillas to juggle flaming swords while they balance. On a pedestal. If you’re if that’s your product, don’t start with how do we build a pedestal? Because most people know how to build a pedestal. You want to test. Can we teach gorillas to juggle? And are they? What’s going to be their appetite for juggling a flaming sword before we even start thinking about the pedestal? But most companies? Most frequently will jump in and try and build the pedestal first because you’re like I know how to build the pedestal and they feel like they’re making progress because they built the pedestal and they’re leaving that hard stuff for later and they’ll just sort it out when the time comes. Don’t do that. Figure out if you can teach the gorillas to juggle the flaming swords. The pedestal will be there.
Susan
I’ve got a boring one in comparison to that, mines more about. You you’re you’re delivering a a service product and you’re and some people are just so fixated on the the bells and whistles of it. Yes, they can do a referral programme. Yes. We’ll give them all points each but. They forget to think about the rules. How will the rules work? Is it actually possible with the technology that you have, or do you need a new tech stack with it? That’s a fabulous idea that you wanna do a referral programme, but in actual fact, how? And then. And that would then lead to going OK what can I tell the marketing people that the product can do for them to write their fluffy marketing message about? Because there’s so many.
Jeff
That’s a perfect example.
Susan
Times if that fails. Absolutely. Ohh the the joys. The joys of technology. What excites you the most about product? You’ve been doing it for so long, but what excites you the very most?
Jeff
Every day you wake up as a PM, you wake up and you say, how can we make this experience better? There’s always something new. There’s always a new challenge, a new problem to solve, and if you’re like me and you get bored easily, that’s a good thing. So to have a new challenge in front of you, Simon Sinek wrote a book called The Infinite Game, and he talks about the the idea that the. That the infinite game is a game that has no rules has no clock. That’s what we were really living in most of the time. Like I said earlier, you know, a companies investment in their product is one of the most important investments that they can make. And so you’re working with this important investment. There are new rules. There are no clock there. There’s. You can’t. Just hold on to the ball and wait for the clock to run out. You’ve gotta do something. So having the idea that you’re always going to have something new to work on, something new to fix something you’re always gonna take it 1 notch closer to a perfect experience and never get there. That to me is is. The amazing opportunity that comes with being a product manager.
Susan
And I’ll probably say some of it also for you would be now that technology is caught up to where you’re thinking may have been 2010 five years ago, they can actually start seeing some things eventuate as well.
Jeff
Well, absolutely, absolutely. And that that that is. Is a major part of excitement, one of the early products that I built when I was at Sprint was before there was even a Wi-Fi standard to build a networking product. We were we were doing service distribution inside the home and we had to go in and wire everything. With. Ethernet. Now a lot of the listeners may not even know what Ethernet is these days because we don’t use it anymore, but it was basically a wired data connection that we we had to distribute the data around the house. So being able to have wireless wireless solutions was a big step for. The stuff that we’re doing now with generative AI, that’s what my next book is going to be about, the idea of what’s the impact of AI in the in the workplace and and how are we going to manage that over time. So definitely interested in that.
Susan
Fantastic. Can’t wait to see when that one lands that you’ll have 2Books.
Catching up to your wife.
Jeff
She’s gonna still smoke me, but yes.
Susan
Now I asked this question of everybody what brand any brand in the world best represents you and why.
Jeff
That’s a really interesting question and. I’m probably gonna give you an answer like you haven’t heard before because I’m picking a band and the band is you 2U2 at U2 is a global brand.
Susan
MMM.
Jeff
They’re very innovative. They have a lot of integrity. It’s art, but it’s focused on customer experience. They had the Big 360 tour stadiums, but they were trying to make a stadium experience very intimate. They recently did the sphere in Vegas. So they’re always using cutting edge technology. They they had a big fail at one point because they put their album on all the iPods and everybody got *** at them because they didn’t want to have their their record on their iPod. So they’re willing to take chances. And they’re willing to to try to deliver with integrity.
Susan
One question I have to ask back. Do you know if they’re cat lovers or not?
Jeff
I do not know if they’re cat lovers. I have to think that the edge is a cat lover.
Susan
Then then, then. It’s a very good pick for you. Thank you so much for sharing that. And thank you so much for your time as well. We’ve learned so much and and really it’s all about grabbing a hold of the. Book what makes great products great. There’s 50,000 hours to stir it into this book to really make it a juicy sauce to go to no matter who you are, what level you are to be able to learn more about product and how to make it the most successful it can be if you go through some simple principles and some more complicated. Ones as well, with all different avenues that you can look at, pick up and go back to over and over again. But product is. All about engaging and having a value and then how do you make sure that it always stays relevant along the way? Change is inevitable and that’s where data can help you so never be afraid to use and utilise data to strengthen opinions, to get things changing and moving along the way because the data will show. What’s working and what isn’t where there’s some gaps, so make sure that you’re working with some people that understand data and can pull up those insights for you if you’re not necessarily specialist in data. Definitely look at how products are within your landscape. They are everywhere and anywhere. Everything you’re doing, even what you’re listening to right now is a product and have decisions made in it for whatever colour it is. The sound quality, all those different pieces was all part of a story to create a product. So what is your product story? How does it fit in and how will? It be used by your audience. Whole pile of different things Jeff shared from his book The Wow Now Matrix, which is a two by two matrix. I’m definitely in love with the quadrant called build because that means that it’s a really hot right now. Everyone’s really excited and there’s technology that can support it. Use this type of concept like the WOW. Now when you’re doing your workshops. With your teams to help identify the low hanging fruit and then the next ones that are going to come along that you should continually to review overtime to see when they make sense to put your. Effort into those. And that’s when it’s about understanding your audience from your data and also your technology and the ease of create from your team and your resources. It’s very important to manage the end to end process including the whole customer journey and being aware of the silos that can happen where possible. Some of the most successful products out there have been at businesses that have seen that there are silos and done their best to remove them or mitigate them as best they can so the consumer can see. One nice journey that’s. Constant and also appealing so that they’re not getting discouraged to along the journey, cause ultimately people that use your product or service you want them to be your advocate. Not only do you want them to come back and use you over and over again where possible, but you want them to positively tell their friends. Now when you are looking at products and the the team that you have within your organisation or the key stakeholders where you can. Diversity can make a difference. More diverse teams can be more successful and have more ideas that perpetuate out of them because they think differently. They’ve got different ways to approach empathy, different ways to think about product and innovation in the consumer appeal. So don’t be afraid to have diverse teams, diverse opinions. Because that will ultimately make whatever the product or services you’re creating, innovating and improving better. And that’s what everyone wants. They want to have that engaging value going on and you can only get that by actually understanding and getting behind there and seeing different viewpoints.
Susan
Now when it does come to your competitors, they will want to go for you. They’ll they’ll want what you’ve got. You want what they’ve got. It’s only natural. So ways that you can stay ahead in the product game is by understanding who your competitors are, why they want to go after you, or why you want to go after them and how you can go about it. So there are four wise in the book that you can use to help you and that helps you also understand your prop. That and further to that you can then look at things like pre mortems as well so that you can really shake your product and service as hard as you can to then come out the other end with the strongest product possible for market. So therefore you’re in the best chance of having success. Anything else you’d like to add, Jeff?
Jeff
Well, it’s been great spending time with you. It’s been great spending time with your listener. I do this to connect with people, so if any of the conversation resonates with the listeners, they should follow me on LinkedIn. They can go to http://www.whatsmakeswhatmakesgreatproductsgreat.com and they can download the free book sample and the templates and diagrams from the book there.
Susan
Amazing. And I’ll make sure all that’s in the show notes for. Everyone. As well, everyone don’t forget to grab a copy of Jeff’s book is available on Amazon. What makes great products great. Keep an eye out for his future book. They’ll be coming out very, very soon. I can’t give a date yet. He gave us a sneak peek. It’s come. And for everyone else, don’t forget to add more to marketing to your playlist so you don’t miss out on more future fabulous guests. More to marketing.