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Building Insanely Great Products – a conversation with David Fradin
10 Plays1 day ago
Understanding how to build and market any product or service
David Fradin returns to the Abecederpodcast The Independent Minds to tell host Michael Millward about his book Building Insanely Great Products.
David learnt about successful product development and launches working at Hewlett Packard and Apple.
David now runs S.P.I.C.E Catalyst a product and service launch model that increases the chances of a successful launch.
In their conversation David explains the different aspects of the S.P.I.C.E framework, including the competencies that a product launch team must possess.
Michael and David discuss why product launches fail.
Their conversation also covers the importance of
- Having accurate information
- Understanding the customer perspective
- Targeting the right customers
- Being able to communicate the value your product or service will add to your customers.
This is the podcast for any business person who wants to successfully launch a new product or service.
Discover more about David and Michael at Abeceder.co.uk
Audience Offers – listings include links that may create a small commission for The Independent Minds
David has written several books
- Building Insanely Great Products
- How to Facilitate Work on Product Teams Workbook
- Do, Innovation, Design Thinking and Value Proposition Workbook
- Building Insanely Great Products Workbook
- Organizing and Managing Insanely Great Products
- U.S. Desktop Video Product Markets: The first definitive business and technology assessment
- Product Market Strategy Workbook
- Successful Product Design and Management Toolkit
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Thank you for listening.
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Transcript
00:00:05
Speaker
Made on Zencaster. The all-in-one podcasting platform on which you can make your podcast in one place and then distribute it to the major platforms like Spotify, Apple, Amazon, and Google YouTube Music. Zencastr really does make making content so easy.
00:00:22
Speaker
Visit zencastr.com. All the details are in the description.
Introduction to 'Independent Minds' series
00:00:27
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the Independent Minds, a series of conversations between Abysseedah and people who think outside the box about how work works with the aim of creating better workplace experiences for everyone.
00:00:42
Speaker
I am your host, Michael Millward, Managing Director of Abysseedah.
Meet David Fradin: Product Success Expert
00:00:46
Speaker
Today I'm going to be learning about how to develop and successfully launch new products or services from David Fradin from Spice Catalyst, an expert in ensuring the success of new products.
00:01:00
Speaker
David has been building successful products since 1969 at organizations including HP and Apple. David also heads a professional development company specializing in building insanely great products, product management and product marketing.
00:01:18
Speaker
David has captured the lessons from his experience in his book, Building Insanely Great Products. Some products fail, many succeed. David is based in Silicon Valley, California, part of the United States. I've been to California, but not Silicon Valley. Maybe one day I will.
00:01:35
Speaker
If I do, I will make my travel arrangements at the Ultimate Travel Club, as that is where I can access trade prices on flights, hotels, holidays, and all sorts of other travel-related purchases.
00:01:47
Speaker
Now that I've paid a little bit of the mortgage, it is time to make an episode of The Independent Minds that will be well worth listening to, liking, downloading and subscribing to.
00:01:58
Speaker
As with every episode of The Independent Minds, we won't be telling you what to think, but we are hoping to make you think. Hello, David. Glad to be with you, Mike. It's great to have you here. Thank you very much and for joining me so early in the morning as well. We are split by several time zones here on the west coast of America, and I'm in brilliant Yorkshire here in the United Kingdom.
00:02:20
Speaker
Please could we start with you telling me a little bit about you, your history, and how you ended up doing what you're doing today?
David's Journey: HP to Apple
00:02:28
Speaker
Well, I got classically trained in product management at Hewlett Packard.
00:02:33
Speaker
And then Apple recruited me because I was a trade HP product manager to bring the first hard disk drive to market. It was very cheap. was only $3,500. And it was huge in size. It was five megabytes, of which we just probably consumed in the last minute on the podcast.
00:02:52
Speaker
I'm wondering when you say that was that was cheap at $3,500, $3,500. And that considered cheap for hard drive.
00:02:58
Speaker
and that was considered cheap for a hard drive I'm just kind of making a joke, but I get it. I get it. I think when that when that was launched, that was probably brilliantly new. And so 3500 was probably very good value for money.
00:03:15
Speaker
Yeah. Well, the only other hard drives that there were were put on many computers or mainframes, and they cost tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars. Yes. You are trained by HP. You are headhunted to go and work at Apple.
00:03:32
Speaker
What happens next? Well, then they noticed I knew how to manage. So they asked me to take over as the group product manager for one of the two profit lines that Apple had, the Apple III business computer.
00:03:47
Speaker
And then Steve Jobs, who at that time did not, was was afraid that the Apple III was occupying a space in the marketplace that his beloved Macintosh had not yet been introduced to go after. So he convinced the executive committee to cancel the product line And about a week after it got canceled, the president of Apple called me into his office and asked me what they should do about the 20, 30 million dollars of piece parts they had spread in manufacturing facilities in Cork, Ireland.
00:04:21
Speaker
in Dallas, Texas, and in Singapore. And I told him that I had all the responsibility for the product line, but none of the authority. And if you'd give me the authority, we would be able to sell off those inventory parts as as new Apple 3s and earn some profits for the company rather than taking a massive loss. Makes sense. So he said, make me a proposal, put together a business plan, presented it to the executive committee of the company. They asked me to take over as the business unit manager. They didn't didn't want to call me a general manager, so they preferred to call me a business unit manager or BUM for short. And we went out and made me 17 people. we sold Apple threes generated
00:05:17
Speaker
1,000 1,500 Apple employees employed and then accident in the market 11 months later. Cool. So what led you to setting up Spice?
Founding Spice Catalyst: Why?
00:05:28
Speaker
Well, the field of product management, which started back in 1932 as brand management at Procter & Gamble, then adapted to technology by Hewlett Packard in 1938 has always been a field of interest to me.
00:05:44
Speaker
Yet most people in the field learned on the job and they weren't becoming effective until as much as two or three years after they started. So I thought there would be a market to train product managers and product marketing managers on how to do the job.
00:06:01
Speaker
across the 130 competencies or skill sets that they need in order to be successful. So I started Spice Catalyst to do that training in addition to consulting.
00:06:12
Speaker
And I actually prefer to call the title not product manager, but product success manager. Because the product manager is principally responsible for the success of the product or the service.
00:06:25
Speaker
There's an interesting point there with my HR professionals hat on is including something in a job title that actually indicates what the result of someone doing that job is.
00:06:38
Speaker
And if yeah the success of a product manager is that they have they are managing a successful product, it makes sense to put success in the job title.
00:06:50
Speaker
Well, i ah I wrote a little humorous blog article about it. It's on my website. spicecantalyst.com that what people could do is take a memo that I drafted there and sent to their boss and it says, Dear boss, I don't know if this ever happened to you, but whenever I go to a cocktail party, and i beat a nice looking lady.
00:07:13
Speaker
And sometimes she asks me, what do I do? And I say I'm a product manager. and she says, what's that? I said, well, I put together the product market strategy, which consists of things like understanding what the customer wants to do, market research, competitive research. I write personas about the target market personal of personalities. I then size the market. I pick the target market.
00:07:39
Speaker
I estimate the size of the market. identify the features that the product should have and the benefits and the advantages over the competition. I write the value propositions, the product positioning, the product strategy, the product roadmap.
00:07:56
Speaker
of the extensions to the product line over time, the pricing strategy, the market strategy, the product market strategy, and so forth. And after maybe about 10 seconds of that, I never get the chance to finish, she turns and walks away.
00:08:15
Speaker
And I say, boss, you know, I don't think with the title product manager, I'll ever get married and have the requisite 2.4 kids. So can I change my title to product success manager?
00:08:26
Speaker
And you could be VP of product success. ah said, P.S. If you let me change my title and I get married, promise I'll invite you to come to the wedding. So I told that story back in 2018 at a meeting of about a hundred Samsung engineers and product managers in Bangalore, India.
00:08:49
Speaker
And the VP of product management came up to me and said about a half a dozen of his product managers asked him if they could change their titles to product success manager. So hopefully the the notion of changing the title to what it exactly is, is will be a successful Yes, focus on the outcomes rather than just the process.
00:09:11
Speaker
Right. I think is a ah very key lesson. And of course, Spice Catalyst is a process with a very specific outcome in mind. Yeah, about 35% of all new products and services that are introduced each year, according to a University of North Carolina study, a fail in the marketplace, which represents a weight billion each year. And the primary reason for of these product failures is they don't follow what I've identified as the five keys to product success.
00:09:48
Speaker
So the five keys to product success are?
Introducing the SPICE Model
00:09:52
Speaker
It's ah rolled up in the mnemonic of my company's name, SPICE of SPICE Catalyst, where the S stands for the product market strategy, which I just described earlier in terms what a product manager does.
00:10:06
Speaker
The P stands for establishing repeatable processes. The I stands for having the information available in order to make informed decisions about the product and the market.
00:10:18
Speaker
The C in in spice is understanding what it is that the customer wants to do, why they want to do it, when do they want to do it, how do they want to do it, where do they want to do it, how important is it for them to get it done, what's standing in their way, and how well are they satisfied with the current way of getting that thing done.
00:10:40
Speaker
And the E of SPICE stands for making sure that your employees and your consultants have all of the 130 competencies or skill sets necessary for product or service success.
00:10:56
Speaker
So those are the five keys. Is it a process? A process to me would suggest that you do one and then you do this next one and all this sort stuff. Or is it just more of a these five things have to happen in order for you to launch a product successfully and sustain that success?
00:11:17
Speaker
Yeah, all five things have to happen. And the P and of process is that if you don't have a defined process, a defined roadmap of steps you go through for product definition and development and release and marketing, that each time you're doing it, you're doing it from scratch and the chances of failure are significantly increased. So you have to climb up the maturity curve by learning from your mistakes and your successes and improving upon it each time.
00:11:51
Speaker
I had a a consulting client once that had five products they put out, all five failed. And they I asked them if they had a process that they were following.
00:12:01
Speaker
He said, no, they don't. And he says, what they have found, though, is by failing to have a repeatable process that's getting mature, they end up creating a culture of blame, where after each product failure, everyone would sit around and point figures at everybody else.
00:12:17
Speaker
So it's the how that you do things is as important as doing something. And working out a repeatable process is it not just any process, but it's the process that works.
00:12:29
Speaker
Yes. That you can prove that it works. And then you've got an increased chance of success for that product. Exactly. Because you've got you've worked out what is required to make it a success. Nobody wants to repeat doing something that didn't work.
00:12:45
Speaker
And yet what you're suggesting there with launching five products and none of them working, they'd either were doing five different things, but what they needed to do really to get successful was the sixth thing.
00:12:57
Speaker
or they're repeating the same mistakes without actually analyzing why they didn't work and identifying what they needed to do in the future. Exactly. Yeah. Work out what is going to make your product a success and create a process around it and then repeat that process. But I suppose also be wise to the fact that situations change and what was successful six months ago may not be most more as successful in a year's time.
00:13:27
Speaker
Yeah, that's because competition changes and markets change over time. yeah A key to product success in terms of understanding the customer is you have to identify
Innovation Driven by Unmet Needs
00:13:38
Speaker
15 unmet needs before your product will be successful. So if you if you go out there and you find that most of the needs are satisfied, then you're either never going to have a successful product or the market window has not yet opened up.
00:13:54
Speaker
ah where people have those 15 unmet needs. So for something like when you talked about the Apple 3 or the Macintosh, what sort of unmet needs existed for that product?
00:14:07
Speaker
Well, in both cases, what people were looking for was an office computer and a small business computer. that enabled them to do accounting, enabled them to do word processing, enabled them to do spreadsheets, and in some cases, enabled them to do graphics and small databases.
00:14:26
Speaker
And the Apple II, for example, the keyboard did not have a ah cap shift key on it. So in order to get a capital letter at the beginning of each sentence, you had to do a strange combination of key taps in order to get a capital.
00:14:44
Speaker
yeah It also had an operating system that Steve Wozniak wrote in about three weeks, primarily so he could go to the big computer show in Las Vegas four weeks later.
00:14:57
Speaker
And one of the assumptions he made is that the largest storage device ever to be used on the Apple II will be the floppy drive, which had 143 kilobytes of storage. So you could not easily connect a larger storage device like the the apple hardest that i brought to market without a change in the operating system.
00:15:21
Speaker
It also did not have what was paramount in the office and in business back then, which would be a letter quality printer. So that if you were able to do word processing, you could only print it out an inkjet printer or a thermal printer. And that was not considered business-like.
00:15:40
Speaker
Unless it was letter quality, like what would come out of an electric IBM Selectric typewriter. So the Apple III was designed for the office, for the small business, to have those capabilities that was not existent in the marketplace at the time.
00:15:58
Speaker
almost must have to dissect the products that exist at the moment to then work out which need is not being met. Exactly. And then create the solution that meets that needs. And if you find a product that already exists that does it, then I suppose it's how well does it do it? How reliable is it? Can you do something that is better than that?
00:16:20
Speaker
Correct. It starts to sound very, very complex. It is no surprise then that there are 130 different competencies that are involved in actually being able to successfully launch a new product.
00:16:34
Speaker
Yeah, and it's both the hard and soft skills. the The hard skills would be things like how to write a product positioning statement. The soft skills would be how to negotiate, how to mediate disputes, how to persuade people, and so forth. Yeah, that reminds me of what you said about the blame culture in organizations that don't have a repeatable process for their product development.
00:17:01
Speaker
Because if you have a group of people working on product development and they have invested their time, their career, their energy, and have made a commitment to that product, you're going to have some very passionate people. And when you have passionate people, you have...
00:17:18
Speaker
let's say heated debates about what is right and having that competency to be able to calm a situation or get everyone to see everyone else's perspective is actually quite key to that process. Exactly. And the the ability to mediate disputes to help find common ground amongst engineering, finance, legal, sales, marketing, see the CXO suite, support, purchasing, manufacturing, and so forth. The ability to bring them all together and get them all ah playing from the same playbook and and marching off in the same direction.
Importance of Accurate Information
00:18:03
Speaker
Yes. i Remembering my experience of working in organizations that were developing new products and even here at Abysida and you're sort of thinking, looking back to working in high-tech organizations when new products were being developed, it's very easy for people to So like focus on what they think is important, what they believe is the right thing to do. But when you actually say, so give us the, why have you got that commitment to that perspective particular perspective of what needs to happen? Where is the information coming from?
00:18:43
Speaker
In many cases, you found it's just, I just know that it's right. It's my gut instinct. Whereas with the spice catalyst model, you're saying that people need proper information to actually back up the decisions that they are making.
00:18:57
Speaker
Exactly. yeah A large part of that is like identifying what isn't ah but doesn't exist in the marketplace, but then also that idea of making sure that the customer also recognizes that it doesn't exist in the marketplace, but it could be possible. Right.
00:19:16
Speaker
Which, of course, ah I remember Steve Jobs in some interview or another saying about the iPhone that nobody knew that or the iPad or the iPod, nobody ever really needed to, or nobody knew that they needed to carry thousands of songs around in their back pocket until the opportunity to be able to do so was made available to them. But now it's like, what did we do before that? ah Well, that's not quite the situation that existed then. And Steve was a little off because Sony had invented a product years before called the Walkman. I had one.
00:19:55
Speaker
Which would play a cassette tape that you could carry around with you. And then Sony did one with a CD ah player that you could carry around with you. So yeah, and the mini disk. Yeah, the mini disk. And so all the iPod did was to convert that to digital storage, and a random playback, which the um the Walkman did not provide that capability.
00:20:24
Speaker
And that's one of the things that people forget is that A lot of the so-called new innovations is doing nothing more than something that people want to do better or faster or higher quality or at lower cost or with some style.
00:20:43
Speaker
So there were other MP3 players around when the iPod came out, but they did not have the ecosystem combined with iTunes to help you download, store, organize your music, and then put it onto your iPod.
00:21:02
Speaker
So was because that ecosystem of the total customer solution was put together, the iPod was successful. that sat That rolled off your tongue like just a couple of sentences.
00:21:14
Speaker
But actually, that is a really important thing, isn't it? It's like you could develop a great product, other MP3 players available. But without the resources, the system, the process, the ecosystem, like you say, to actually feed the machine, the MP3 player, that it's a pointless product. You've got to make it easy for people to use the insanely great product that you have created.
00:21:44
Speaker
Correct. Yeah. And that means that you have to think about not just what is technically or professionally or mechanically possible, but also how is the customer going to use it and who is going to be your customer as well? Yes. And you can easily target the wrong customers with the wrong product and become part of that 35% that's not successful.
00:22:11
Speaker
Yes. What sort of things did you go through with Apple HP or with existing clients that you've had with the Spice Catalyst that helps to explain how to identify who the customer is most likely to be? Well, what I teach in understanding the customer is first go out and observe what ah people or if it's a B&B company, what companies are doing.
00:22:39
Speaker
And they you can't ask people what they want or what they need, because that means they understand what and can define the problem, and they also can define a potential solution.
00:22:51
Speaker
So, for example, the story goes that when Henry Ford was thinking about inventing an affordable car, He went out he asked people if they wanted a car.
00:23:02
Speaker
And the answer was, no, they wanted a faster horse. Well, if he'd gone out on the stoop of one of the saloons at the time in Dearborn, Michigan, not far from where I grew up,
00:23:14
Speaker
you would have noticed people Hitting ah horses with sticks in order to get them to gallop through town faster. And even if the Internet existed back there and he tried to figure out what problem are people searching for, there was probably no keyword searches on automobile or car because no one could envision such a solution to that problem.
00:23:38
Speaker
But they probably were would have been searching for which breed a horse can run faster than another type of horse. So I advocate you first start by observing what people do, like a social anthropologist.
00:23:55
Speaker
From the information you gain from those observations, you put together an interview and then you interview 40 to 80 prospective customers. and then based upon refining the interview questions into a survey you then survey about 800 to 1200 of your target market in order to get a a base of data that you can then use to extrapolate over the entire market and from that you can then figure out what it is that your customers want to do. It's like understanding what people do now and then how what you want to offer them will improve what they want to do. But you have to educate people about your new product and how wonderful it is.
00:24:46
Speaker
how insanely great it is before they will realize how great it is. You can't accept or expect people to simply understand what it is that you're trying to do.
00:24:57
Speaker
Exactly. Yeah. It's more than just a case of thinking up a product and launching it and i think it's a barnum the entertainment promoter was someone who said that you if you put a show on people will come it's not quite as straightforward or as simple as that is it creating these uh insanely great products it's it's much more complex Yeah, there's this myth that if you build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door.
Debunking Product Development Myths
00:25:33
Speaker
Well, if they don't know the mousetrap exists, they have no idea that they need to beat a path to your door. That, along with this act, quickly break things and fail fast, which is sort of like saying...
00:25:48
Speaker
Okay, congratulations, you're sharpshooter. Go out there and ready fire, and then after you fired your gun, aim. That is all wrong, and that always results in product failure rather than success.
00:26:03
Speaker
Yeah, so it's plan, plan, plan, and follow this model, the SPICE Catalyst Model for Product Development. You know, David, I really have to say thank you because there are so many things that you have said in just like that little sentence and a light bulb went on in my head and another sentence and light bulb went on. And it's like, yeah, I understand.
00:26:26
Speaker
It's brilliant. Thank you very much. I've really enjoyed the last half an hour. It's been fantastic. Can't thank you enough. Well, well thanks for having me on your show. It's been brilliant. Thank you very much.
00:26:38
Speaker
I am Michael Millward, the Managing Director of Abusida, and I have been having a conversation with the independent mind, David Fraden, a product success specialist. You can find out more about both of us at abusida.co.uk. There is a link in the description.
00:26:56
Speaker
I must remember to thank the team at matchmaker.fm for introducing me to David. If you are a podcaster looking for interesting guests, or if like David, you have something very interesting to say, matchmaker.fm is where matches of great hosts and great guests are made.
00:27:13
Speaker
There's a link to matchmaker.fm and an offer code in the description. you're listening to the independent minds on your smartphone, you may like to know that 3.0 has the UK's fastest 5G network with unlimited data. So listening on 3.0 means you can wave goodbye to buffering.
00:27:29
Speaker
There's a link in the description that will take you to more information about business and personal telecom solutions from 3.0 and the special offers available when you quote my referral code.
00:27:40
Speaker
The description also includes links to all of the websites that have been mentioned in this episode of the Independent Minds, including opportunities to buy David's book. That description is well worth reading.
00:27:54
Speaker
If you've liked this episode of The Independent Minds, please give it a like and download it so that you can listen anytime, anywhere. To make sure you don't miss out on future episodes, please subscribe.
00:28:05
Speaker
Remember, the aim of all the podcasts produced by Abbasida is not to tell you what to think, but we do hope to have made you think. Until the next step episode of The Independent Minds, thank you for listening and goodbye.