Product Market Strategy: Values, Vision, Mission Statement, Customer and Innovation

This is the second episode of Product Success Issues covering the first parts of the Product Market Strategy: Values, Vision, Mission Statement, Understanding the Customer, and Innovation.

Transcription:

[Music] broadcasting from the business capital of the world this is the podcast Business News Network welcome back to the show David fren joining us here again he’s our president from Spice Catalyst and so much more really an amazing backstory I got to meet him a few weeks ago to learn all about his history and what he’s doing and now he’s training and Consulting on product and services success go to spice catalyst.com to find out more in the meantime let’s say welcome how are you I’m doing great how about yourself I’m doing fantastic and excited to have you back to talk more about your product Market training and management and all that you do so it’s kind of hard to say hey give us a little overview because you’re a man who’s done it all uh written so many books and has so much going on but say say hello to everyone tell us a little bit about what you’re doing oh I teach uh product management or I prefer to call it product success and product marketing uh to major corporations around the world uh my number one client is Cisco and I and my instructors have prayed about half of all of their product successor product managers uh worldwide including in India and in Europe and in uh China beautiful my goodness you have so much going on I don’t know how you sleep do you find time to sleep oh yeah you do see some people work on less sleep I figured you’re one of those people who gets like three hours a night no

no David yes all there you go you froze all right well good to have you here and excited today to get on board to talk more um about you know you know the work that you’re doing and the strategy of marketing the products right so the importance of values I know you wanted to kind of introduce in for today’s show where did you want to start well in putting together a product Market strategy for your product and by market I mean that’s a place where you go to buy something like a grocery store marketing is the activity involved in getting people to go to that store to buy stuff so I’ve identified in my book that was published by Wy a couple of years ago uh entitled successful product uh design toolkit and management uh book and it’s available also on Amazon if you just uh search for my name on Amazon all of my books will show up there so in that book I’ve identified 32 key components of the product Market strategy and I thought in this episode uh we’ll talk about the first five which is the importance of values uh having a vision uh for the product a mission statement understanding the customer which I think is the most important thing and then with that in mind what kind of innovation and how can you come about innovation in order to Chronic a Competitive Edge in the marketplace awesome well thank you for sharing that and by the way I just want to point out if you are looking for him uh under spice catalyst.com great but also as an author fayen is spelled f r a d i n David fayen that’s how you find the books right right awesome and you can go right to the website too and uh there’s a link there on Amazon as well correct now do you want to start by walking us through uh you know the basic of the importance of values and you know the vision then we’ll get to the mission statement of how we could pursue and Market everything this is you know you have a very um unique background with all your experience so just to let people know you are a distinguished professor and uh you know we went over last time those five keys to product and service success which we’re going to elaborate on now well in the case of values what I was researching uh for my book bill saing great products uh which also was available on Amazon um I wondered if values entered into whether not a company is still around so I went back to the first U uh Fortune 500 list U which was created back in 1965 and I made a column with all those companies names that I made a column of whether or not they had values whether or not they followed those values and then whether or not they’re still in business today uh and to my surprise I found that about 300 of those 500 companies that did not have values or if they did and did not followed they were out of business so it’s very critical that you have a set of corporate values that everyone believes in and has discussed and has internalized so they go into meetings with other fellow workers at that company they’re all coming from the same place the same set of values uh as opposed to maybe uh one uh company like apple has a positive social contribution and uh empathy for the customer versus say an iron Rand set of values which says make a profit at all costs and it doesn’t matter what you do to the environment and to what you do to your employees uh the stock market and the price of the stock would take care of everything else including your social uh commitment and empathy for the customer which generally does not work espe long term as evidence by those 300 Fortune 500 companies that have gone out of business wow thought about those values in terms of my own personal career so I made a little table uh listing the 25 organizations for profit and nonprofit that I’ve been associated with over my career uh then the First Column is did they have values the second column is did they follow those values and the third column is uh did they did it map into my person values and almost without exception those companies that didn’t have values and or did not follow their values which of course was opposed to my set of values I was miserable working at and either I quit and was happy the next day or I got fired and I was even happy the next day and I called that a mercy killing but at those companies and organizations that had values and followed their values like hulet Packard and apple and others I thrived got promoted I was very happy and a friend of mine who is my property manager for my Maui vacation rental which you can see the view [Music] of uh in the background behind me uh he uh left Mai came to the Bay area where I’m currently residing in Silicon Valley and he was interviewing for a job and I told him about the value story and he went out on a interview the next day or so and he I said wait until after they finish ask asking you all the questions then you ask them what is your company’s values and if you find out that those values do not map into your personal values then run as fast as you can away from that job because you just won’t be happy there so one of his interviews he went on he started talking about values for four hours uh with the potential hiring manager uh and he got hired and he said he’s never been happier more uh in his entire life so the importance of values is not only to for product success and corporate success but it’s also very important for personal success thank you for sharing that and also I know you as an entrepreneur as a business owner it’s good to know the company has values how does it work when you work for a company do you have a whole handbook on it and it’s something that you you all discuss because I’ve worked for some companies that didn’t have those handbooks and I feel like um you get a little lost if I could say it kindly well at huet Packard uh they called it the HP way and um at our introduction uh or or inod being introduced to the company going to work for the company the first day of orientation you spent part of that day talking about the values and you almost do a round table you go around the room and ask all of the new employees uh what these values mean to you and how do you plan to go about following them so that you internalize it when I went to work for Apple they did exactly the same thing and it turns out apple one of the first things they did their VP of human resources and Bowers who was also the VP of uh uh HR at Intel the the chip manufacturer and I found out later that she was married to Bob Noy the found one of the founders of uh Intel uh she probably got a group of people uh together at Apple and encouraged them to write up a set of values and what those values and apple words empathy for our customer our users achievement and aggressiveness positive social contribution individual performance team spirit Innovation and vision uh individual growth and reward quality and excellence and good management and they actually gave everybody a little plaque I don’t know if you’ll be able to see it because of the blue screen there we go um that uh we keep on our desk so we keep that on our desk and everybody knows exactly what values are uh all the time and it’s right there in front of them I I went to work for one company a few years ago they didn’t have any values so I gave them a set of values that I had for my previous companies which is a blend of a few things that that I felt were important U plus the HPA and the uh Apple uh values and they say okay we’ll follow these I said well now we need to have a discussion about it and he would never set up a discussion and generally he uh did not follow those values and his management of that company so I was very unhappy there and I quit uh so uh another example of that is uh Volkswagen a few years ago uh tinkered with their uh diesel engine cars to fool the Environmental Protection Agency into thinking that it was not polluting the air as much as it was uh and at that time I I said I wonder if VW has values so I went to their website and uh VW had a very strong set of values listed there but they didn’t follow them in the instance of the this cheating over the emissions and just the other day I went to vw’s website and there’s no mention of values there at all so not only did they drop their values but it also caused the value of their stock to drop by billions of dollars and the reason that VW is building electric charging stations around the world for free is because that’s the way they’re paying back for the damage they did to the environment by cheating on their their decent cars so that’s how important values are to the success of a company and to personal success thank you so much and if you are just tuning in we want to remind everyone of your website how we find you spice catalyst.com right one word spice Catalyst all right David fayen here on the line and talking today here more about um you know the product Market Strat he beles in so the V the vision the mission statement understanding the customer The Innovation is what we’re walking through today here so again if you are tuning in welcome to the show and we’re excited to have you and you could always go back and watch of course our first episode when we took an in-depth look at those key products to success all right David what else do we have in mind for us well then the next thing is to have a vision for your for your company for your fun a vision is where you want to go and then you combine that uh with your values and you then have a mission statement and then once you have that laid down then the product or service that you choose to develop uh around will fit into that mission statement and the vision and the set of values and then the next important thing is to understand your customer and I do that from uh understanding what it is that your customer wants to do why they want to do it when do they want to do it where do they want to do it how do they want to do it what’s standing in their way how important is it to get that thing done and lastly how satisfied are they with the current way of uh doing that uh I the My Philosophy in putting that little structure together is based upon several books I think written by a Harvard Professor called outcome based Innovation and then enhanced by a fellow that uh has a company called cim in San Francisco and he wrote a book called jobs to be done I thought both of the are very useful in terms of providing the 15 unmet needs you have to have so that your product or your service uh can be successful uh you have to find those needs and have your product or service uh satisfy them but I found the job to be done still too big of a problem and an example I use is a few years ago I was speaking at a conference in Singapore and needed to go to Bangalore uh the next day in order to trade some Cisco product managers so the job to be done was to go from my hotel in uh Singapore to my hotel in Bangalore which was near the uh U The Cisco Engineering campus that’s located there well that the things I needed to do to do that is I needed to figure out which mode of transportation I was going to use to get to the airport how much would cost how long it would take and um and then what time I would have to leave in the morning so I figured all that out those are the things I had to do and why did I have to do them is because I needed to get to the airport to catch my flight got to the airport and I don’t know if anybody’s been to the Singapore airport is huge uh I had no idea where my check-in counter was so I went to the uh information desk which was conveniently right by the front door and asked them but they pointed me to the check-in uh counter uh and I’m saying to myself my phone knows that I’m at the airport my phone knows what airline I’m going to fly out on why can’t my phone tell me where to go uh in the airport so I went there and they said uh uh to make a long story short they said uh show us your ticket to leave India and I said well I’m first going to be speaking to different companies like Samsung and Phillips and others and uh by agenda has not been finalized yet by Manny pal University those speeches so I don’t know when I’m leaving they said you can’t go unless you can prove you’re going to leave I said trust me I don’t want to become one of those at one point three billion people in India trust me I’ll leave no you can’t go unless you prove you you’re leaving uh so then I had to buy a ticket to get uh get out of there and they say well uh you can go over to terminal one which was I think like a mile away and I said I’m not going to walk all the way there from Terminal 2 and then all the way back to go to a travel agency and then they said well you can buy it online uh so by that time I was hungry it was about uh 6:00 in the morning so I went up to the mezzanine and sat down in a restaurant and tried to call up the uh travel website uh to buy a ticket uh when I started to do that I needed to access Wi-Fi but I needed to get the password in order to get the password they were going to text me the password well I had bought an eim when I landed in Singapore it was supposed to work in that country and it didn’t work so there’s no way I could get a text with the PIN number so I could buy a ticket proving I was going to leave India so that I can go to India and fulfill my obligations so then the waitress says you can go back to that information desk which was all the way on the other side of the terminal and they’ll give you a password so I had to go through all that well my phone knew that I was going to India uh the the airline knew I was going there why couldn’t they tell me I needed to have a ticket to leave uh before I could go and so forth so those are all the things that one discovers when you understand what it is that the customer wants to do and why they want to do it when they want to do it where they want to do it how they want to do it what’s standing in their way how important is it to get done and how satisfactory is the current way of doing things of course in my little story most of that was not very satisfactory because my goal was to get through security go to the business class Lounge have a free breakfast as opposed to uh in this case uh having to uh figure out everything while I was trying to have breakfast wow multitasking right never stops so the key uh that is what you have that understood uh and the reason then you go out and do Innovation and there was a guy by the name of Henry Ford wanted to innovate and come up with a uh cost effective car so the story is is that he went out of the streets of deboard which is not far from where I grew up and he asked people would you like to have a car and they said no I want a faster horse well if he had just observed people riding their horses through town uh back around the uh late turn of the century uh they uh he would have noticed they were whipping the horse in order to get from one part of town to another part of town and and that gets to the point that people can’t tell you what they want or what they need but they can show you and you can learn by observing uh what it is that they want to do so you observe first interview them second third do uh surveys of a representative sample of the personas you’re going to Target in your product Market strategy and then you can project what your potential sales are what your cost of development and what your return on investment might be which is good to not only get your product funded internally or if you’re trying to do a startup or entrepreneurial type thing uh you could then have the data necessary uh to show your prospective investors that their investment uh will be successful and that’s the beginning of innovation uh which is called uh design thinking and You observe what others are doing you uh then innovate and you uh test and then you innovat more and improve and then uh you just continue in a in an agile type of fashion uh until you’ve uh perfected the product uh then you put it out on the marketplace well also um just to point out to everyone I want to remind everyone David fren here Hing from us today live as he always does not from Maui but that is the picture behind him if you could see you’re in losgatos California correct correct perfect and spice catalyst is the name of the company and he’s joining us here today uh again as you hopefully you’ve been listening uh to talk about the product management the marketing training and all the Consulting that him and his company can do also as an author uh he can be seen also speaking on many stages uh he clearly has a knack for this and we’re going over the marketing and professional development today here on the show spice catalyst.com don’t forget and let’s go back now to our topics of the day which we’re working on the product Market strategy just talking about Innovation and uh we did our importance of value or vision mission statement understanding the customer and Innovation like Henry Ford didn’t know you grew up so close to him yeah I was very close and uh uh in the 50s when I grew up in Detroit is sort of like Silicon Valley a lot of entrepreneurs a lot of startup businesses a large influx influx of people uh from the south that came there for the good jobs and and the good uh living environment uh and silica Valley is is very much like that except it it got started really big uh in the 70s and in the

80s now as far as um you we still have uh there’s only five minutes left in the show but what other aspects of you know your company helping to Market themselves you know your expertise in this would you say is valuable for our listeners to to know today well what I’ll talk about in the future episodes of this is the other major components of the product Market strategy uh which are personas that’s understanding uh who your customer is and if you’re a businesso business company then understanding the businesses that you’re going to Target uh then doing the market and competitive research understanding the status of the market and how quickly the market is going to adopt uh and then go through uh some technological insights through 16 massive changes that will be occurring uh like climate change like uh pandemics like uh artificial intelligence uh the internet of things and so forth out of which you could uh if you have a current product you got to make sure that these Perfect Storm things are not going to affect your product and they also offer opportunities for new products and services then we’ll talk about product positioning which I think is the most important thing uh and the state of the Mind a position of the mind for your product we’ll talk about uh then calculating total available Market uh coming up with a market penetration strategy and a distribution strategy and I’ll give examples for each of these uh and then we’ll go go on and talk about the process the uh product life cycle framework uh the digital transformation that’s going on in many companies I was retained a few years ago by sabic which is the uh state-owned Plastics Company of Saudi Arabia oh wow and they uh wanted to go through a digital transformation so a design engineer is trying to figure out what plastic they would use would go to a book that uh sabic would put out and look up the characteristics of the plastic that they might want to design it to their product and then by seix uh plastic well Autodesk which does computerated design software Incorporated lists of plastics and their characteristics in their design software and saic was not one of them so anybody that was designing a new product with an Autodesk product were picking the sabic’s competitors so they had to learn how they could possibly go through a digital transformation and get into the uh computer AED design programs of other companies in order for their product to be specified in for the new product development I’ll then talk about the customer journey and understanding the customer Journey uh the impact of social media on the marketing and the design of products and uh understanding who makes the decisions who needs to be informed who’s the driver and who’s the approver a DAC chart in order to make decisions about your uh product and then lastly uh in that area the uh getting the information available in order to make informed decisions beautiful and your value system at spice Catalyst do the best job you can try hard work hard but take time for your family for yourself and your family right yep and have fun ah I didn’t know that part all right good and if we want to reach out to you remind us how we do so and where we could pick up the copy of your books U you can go to Amazon and just search for my name David fren and uh all of my books uh will be showing up there amazing thank you so much for being here for joining us and looking forward to our next conversation are we back on is it next week yes all right so that’s product Market strategy continued we’ll work on that thank you so much for being here enjoy the rest of your day how’s the weather in California right now probably really nice perfect 72 degrees clear skies no fires oh thank goodness chil 50 something degrees here in New York looking forward to next week David thank you so much be bet all right have a great day byebye and to all of our listeners stay tuned we’ll be back for more

broadcasting from the business capital of the world this is the podcast Business News Network