Product Quest Podcast

Episode 38: Corporate Startups and Innovation Accounting with Esther Gons

Many of you, innovators out there will have been faced with the following question by a senior leader about an early-stage innovation idea: “Yeah, but what’s the ROI?” Of course, sometimes you just don’t know yet and it’s a bad question at a bad moment in time. But then again: Management is there to manage, whether it’s about the core or about new ventures. So how can we measure innovation? Our guest today took a brilliant approach to this problem she calls “Innovation accounting”.
Esther Gons is one of those thinkers in innovation that just seems to win a prize with every new publication. Together with Dan Toma and Tendayi Viki she wrote “The Corporate Startup” which won a 2019 Golden Axiom Business Book Award and the 2018 Management Book of the year Award. The latest book “Innovation accounting” again won a 2022 Axiom Business Book gold Award. Esther is the founder and CEO of GroundControl, an innovation management software that helps corporate startup teams with the structure and learning for new business models. Esther is an international speaker, an entrepreneur for over 20 years and has mentored several hundred startups as an investor in the NEXT startup ventures, lead mentor in the Rockstar accelerator program or in the Lean Startup Machine weekends.

Episode 37: Cybernetics on Design and Innovation with Paul Pangaro

One word that comes up often in design and innovation is the word "need". "Goals" are central to Alan Cooper's influential "goal driven design". A famous book in Jobs-to-be-Done theory is called "what customers want". And of course the word "job" is right there in the name "jobs-to-be-done". Chairs, rocks, stories, stars, information, music and countless other things do not have "needs", "goals", "jobs" or "wants". But people, animals, organizations, societies do have these things. And they have them because they are what we might call purposeful systems, they can have goals and try to reach them.
The original movement to scientifically study and understand purposeful systems was cybernetics and many important ideas in engineering and AI can directly be traced back to the work from the original cyberneticians. It has had an influence on just about any field one can imagine: Psychology and Architecture to Management, Education and Theatre... you name it! From the beginning, through the work of major figures in the field like Ross Ashby, cybernetics has had quite a bit to say about design, which is what we discuss in this episode.
Our guest today is Paul Pangaro.
Paul is the president of the American Society for Cybernetics which was founded in 1964 and is currently a visiting scholar in both the School of Architecture and School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University. Paul worked for a time at the famous startup incubator Idealab, was the CTO of several startups, and also founded several of his own. He has taught many courses over the years, namely at Stanford, on the role of cybernetic models in the design of products, services, and teams. He is a recognized expert in the cybernetics field of conversation theory, which is central to his understanding of design and which we talk about in our discussion.
You can find Paul at www.pangaro.com on twitter at @paulpangaro.
Show references:
- Notes on the Role of Leadership and Language in Regenerating Organizations, Pangaro & Geoghegan
- ON MODELING What is interaction? are there different types? Dubberly, Pangaro, Haque
- Cybernetics and Design: Conversations for Action, Dubberly & Pangaro
- A Cybernetic Perspective on Design and Creativity: a Conversation with Dr. Paul Pangaro
- Introduction to Cybernetics, Ross Ashby
- Conversation Theory, Gordon Pask
 
 
 

Episode 36: JTBD, the genius of AND and levels of abstraction

Today, we welcome our special guest, Dr. Andrew DiMeo. Andrew is a former professor at NC State and UNC in biomedical engineering. He’s an entrepreneur, having built CanvasGT, whiteboard software that was acquired by medtech software firm Greenlight guru. 
Andrew is a big thinker in all things innovation and all things relating to medical devices. But more importantly than that, he’s a super dude and friend who has a lot to say on many topics. 

Episode 35: Product led Growth with Leah Tharin

Today, we welcome our special guest, Leah Tharin. Leah is the Head of Product at Jua.ai. She’s an advocate for product-led growth, something we’re certain to get into today. She has an impressive background in product management and product leadership, but the thing that brought her into view for me is that she is a direct and brilliant communicator really on all things product, from the challenges of a product team to those of leadership. 
Find out more here: https://www.leahtharin.com/
Get the product-led Growth Guide here: https://www.leahtharin.com/p/the-product-led-growth-guide

Episode 34: Framing JTBD Initiatives with Rob Schade

Today, we welcome our special guest, Rob Schade. Rob is the Chief Customer Officer of Strategyn. Strategyn, of course, is the innovation firm founded by JTBD pioneer Tony Ulwick. Rob was actually the second employee of Strategyn over 20 years ago and has personally been part of the JTBD’s development from a theory where we just talk about milkshakes to a repeatable process that innovators can actually use.
For our listeners, let me make an impassioned plea for why you’ll want to listen to this episode from beginning to end. The most critical part using JTBD is framing… or establishing the bounds of a project and define your market to be pursued. Rob has led this activity perhaps more than any other person in the world. So let that sink in, Rob has framed more JTBD projects than anyone else; so hang with us today as we’ll explore some tips for how to do this well.
Additionally, Rob has had some other interesting experiences, including owning a night club in New York City. I personally have a lot of questions about that!

Episode 33: Applying JTBD in UX Design with Wolfram Nagel

Our guest today is Wolfram Nagel Senior UX Designer at TeamViewer. I think it’s fair to say that Wolfram has been in UX before it was cool and has worked in different companies and as a freelancer. He’s published a book on Multiscreen UX Design, is co-founder and main curator of designmethodsfinder.com, he’s a public speaker and regularly publishes insightful articles on wolframnagel.medium.com. In addition to that the likelihood to meet him at a Jobs-to-be-done or UX Meetup is quite high. So, today we will take a deep dive on how UX and Jobs-to-be-done are a match made in heaven.

Episode 32: The Art and Science of Causality with Paul Huenermund

Decisions shape the future. Making better decisions is critical for people and for society.Businesses make strategic decisions all the time about where to invest, who to partner with, where toadvertise and much more. Customers make decisions about what products to buy and to use. Innovators, designers and engineers make decisions about what to build so that customers purchase and use what they makeBusinesses have become more and more data-driven, with data science becoming ubiquitous, butconventional data science has its limitations.
In this episode we discuss why understanding causality is critical for making better decisions and how leadingbusinesses are increasingly looking to incorporate causality in their data driven decision makingOur guest today is Paul Hünermund. Paul is an Assistant Professor of Strategy and Innovation at theCopenhagen Business School, his research interests lie in the area of innovation, firm strategy, R&D policyand causal inference. He is the co-founder of causalscience.org, a platform for fostering knowledge exchangebetween industry and academia on topics related to causal data science.
References mentioned on the show:
Causal Machine Learning and Business Decision Making by P. Hünermund, J. Kaminski and C. Schmitt
The Book of Why by Judea Pearl

Episode 31: Retrospective 2022

In this special episode we review all the guests we interviewed on the show this year and reflect upon what we learned, what we liked and the questions we wished we had asked!
This episode turned out to be much longer than planned, so here are the timestamps if you want to jump to a particular guest:
01:40          Ruth Hartt
15:50        Lance Bettencourt
25:04       Ronan and Jane
31:20        Indi Young
40:14       Jim Kalbach
53:00       Dan Adams
1:05:30    Beat Walther
1:13:00    Jan Schmiedgen
1:22:00    Katerina Kozludzhova
1:25:10     Murat and Francesco
1:31:17      Michele Hansen
1:41:45     Lindsay Zaltman
1:54:50    Min Basadur
2:04:30    Gerry McGovern
2:11:20     Giorgio Pauletto
2:19:50     Tim Macarthur
2:24:10     Joe Leech
2:32:00    Ian Kerr & Jason Frasca
2:37:15     Sergei Ikovenko
2:46:20    Tony Ulwick

Episode 30: Jobs-to-be-done with Tony Ulwick

Today, we welcome our special guest, Tony Ulwick. If you’ve worked in, read about, or even heard of JTBD, then you know his name. Tony is the creator of Outcome-Driven Innovation, known as ODI. ODI takes this theory, this philosophy of JTBD and presents it as a repeatable process. 
Tony is well published with his key work from 2005  “What Customers Want" or his HBR articles “Turn Customer Input into Innovation” and “The Customer-Centered Innovation Map” which have become classic reads of our field.

Episode 29: TRIZ – Theory of Inventive Problem Solving with Sergei Ikovenko

Today, we welcome Dr. Sergei Ikovenko. Sergei is one of the world’s leading authorities in the Theory of Inventive Problem Solving, commonly known as TRIZ. He has conducted over 1,500 workshops (that’s 1500) on TRIZ at a long list of companies, including P&G, GE, and Hyundai… and many others, including the Chinese Patent Office and the Swiss Patent Office…he’s lectured all over the world at Harvard, MIT, Carnegie-Mellon, Stanford.  Sergei has doctorates in mechanical engineering as well as environmental engineering – and to keep it interesting -  a master’s degree in patent law. He’s written over 100 publications and books, has been a TEDx speaker and keynote speaker at events such as the MIT Sloan Management Forum.