TEI 206: Remarkable product VPs and their reasons to improve team performance – Chad McAllister, PhD

Bottom line: product management is all about the customer Do you lead a product team or are you part of a team that should improve performance? I’ve been helping product teams and groups of product managers accomplish that — get higher performance. When I ask them why they need to improve performance, I typically hear one of four answers, with the most common being to create more of a customer focus. I also wanted to hear from product VPs and Directors that I haven’t worked with yet. So, I contacted several and received answers from 91 product leaders. You’ll find the results not only interesting but also valuable, as you will hear how other product professionals think about improving their teams and what is most important to your performance. For example, should you focus on revenue or customer value? To help me share the information, I am joined by our guest from episode 174, Colleen Knuff, a Senior Director of Product Management. But this time she is interviewing me, taking the role of host. In addition to the reasons product leaders give for improving team performance, we also discussed: * why this podcast is named The Everyday Innovator™, * where I developed my passion for helping product managers and teams improve their performance, and * the value of personality assessments. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:24] Why did you name the podcast The Everyday Innovator™? There are a lot of us who are wired to identify a problem and create a solution for it. We all want to build great products that customers love and have more influence in their organization. This notion sums up The Everyday Innovator™ mindset — people who look at the world from a problem-solving perspective and want to build great things. Those people are Everyday Innovators and I wanted to make a podcast for them. [4:54] How did you become so passionate about product management and leadership? I studied electrical engineering in college and joined a small system engineering company after graduation. I was the fourth person hired in the company, which meant I wore a lot of hats. We started creating prototypes for customers. This was the perfect job for me. A pivotal point came when I was asked to demonstrate another company’s software product prototype at a special event in Washington, D.C. It was an incredible experience — really doing user observations before I had any understanding of what ethnographic research was. I found out what they needed the product to do. The demonstration was a success and in a short time I was leading a product development team with a few million dollar budget. It was an amazing experience but it was followed with other product experiences where I thought I was following similar processes, and not all the products were as successful.  I got a little obsessed about that inconsistency, which led me to earn a Ph.D. in innovation so I could study the problem more deeply. That team that came about from the D.C. demonstration became a truly high-performing product team. It was amazing. All of us didn’t realize just how amazing it was until it ended. And it ending was incredibly sad. Being part of a high performing team that is developing products customers love is an extraordinary experience and wanting that for everyone involved in product is what fuels my passion and why I have created training and experiences to enable product managers and product teams to also be extraordinary. [11:20] How are you continuing to pursue those questions of innovation and problem solving? I’ve been working with groups of product managers and also product teams in different companies to help them improve their performance. It is a system I developed called the Rapid Product Mastery Experience, or the RPM Experience for short. I started asking some of the leaders in the compani...