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Build, market and launch successful products and services – a conversation with David Fradin
18 Plays6 days ago
David Fradin has been building successful products and services since 1969, at organizations including at HP as well as Apple, where he was at the same management level as Steve Jobs.
Now he has used all his experience to create the S.P.I.C.E Catalyst.
S.P.I.C.E Catalyst is on a mission to help aspiring and experienced product professionals and to build insanely great products and services that delight customers and create value.
In this episode of The Independent Minds David outlines the S.P.I.C.E Catalyst Model to host Michael Millward and shares the experience that helped him create it.
The Independent Minds is made on Zencastr, the all-in-one podcasting platform, on which you can create your podcast in one place and then distribute it to the major platforms. Zencastr really does make creating content so easy.
Try podcasting using Zencastruse our offer code ABECEDER.
Find out more about both Michael Millward and David Fradin at Abeceder.co.uk
Buy Books written by David Fradin
Travel
David Fradin is based in California, USA.
If you would like to travel to California, the best place to make your travel arrangements is The Ultimate Travel Club, which is where you can access trade prices for flights, hotels and holidays. Use my offer code ABEC79 to receive a discount on your membership fee.
Matchmaker.fm
Thank you to the team at Matchmaker.fm the introduction to David.
If you are a podcaster looking for interesting guests or if like David, you have something interesting to say Matchmaker.fm is where matches of great hosts and great guests are made. Use our offer code MILW10 for a discount on membership.
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Being a Guest
If you would like to be a guest on The Independent Minds, please contact using the link at Abeceder.co.uk.
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Thank you for listening.
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Transcript
Introduction to The Independent Minds Podcast
00:00:05
Speaker
Made on Zencaster. Hello and welcome to The Independent Minds, a series of conversations between Abisida and people who think outside the box about how work works with the aim of creating better workplace experiences for everyone.
Focus on Product Creation with David Fraden
00:00:21
Speaker
I am your host, Michael Millward, managing director of Abisida. Today, we are going to be discussing how to create insanely great products with someone who's got some great experience of doing that.
00:00:35
Speaker
As the jingle at the start of this podcast says, the independent minds is made on Zencaster. Zencaster is the all in one podcasting platform on which you can make your podcast in one place and then distribute it to all the major platforms like Spotify, Apple, Amazon, and YouTube Music.
00:00:55
Speaker
Zenkaster really does make making content so easy. If you would like to try podcasting using Zenkaster, visit zenkaster.com forward slash pricing and use my offer code ABACEDA.
David Fraden's Career Insights at HP and Apple
00:01:10
Speaker
All the details are in the description.
00:01:13
Speaker
Now that I've told you how wonderful Zencaster is for making podcasts, we should make one. One that will be well worth listening to, liking, downloading, and subscribing to. As with every episode of The Independent Minds, we won't be telling you what to think, but we do hope to make you think. Today, my guest, Independent Mind, who I met at matchmaker dot.fm,
00:01:38
Speaker
is David Fraden from Spice Catalyst. David is an expert in ensuring the success of new products. David has been building successful products since 1969 at organisations including Hewlett-Packard, which many people refer to as HP, as well as Apple.
00:01:58
Speaker
And at Apple, David was on the same management level as Steve Jobs. David also has a professional development company specializing in building insanely great products, product management and product marketing. He has used his experience at HP and at Apple to create training, which has been used by thousands of managers across the world. He's also written several books.
00:02:25
Speaker
David is based in Santa Clara in California, United States. This is the area which many people refer to as Silicon Valley. Now here's an interesting fact about Santa Clara. It is with a population according to the 2020 census of 127,647 people, the eighth largest city in the Bay area that is centered around San Francisco.
Background of David Fraden and Bay Area Experiences
00:02:52
Speaker
Makes me wonder, if the eighth biggest city has a population of over 100,000, how big is the Bay Area itself? Well, usually at this point,
00:03:05
Speaker
I say I've never been to the place where my guest lives, but today I can say that I did spend a week in the Bay Area a few years ago. I stayed a week in the hope that the mist would lift so I could see the Gold Gate Bridge. If I ever return to the Bay Area, I will be sure to plan my travel with 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. Now that I've paid the mortgage,
00:03:33
Speaker
It is time to make an episode of The Independent Minds. Hello, David. Hi, glad to be with you. It's a privilege to have someone who's had such an industrious career with us, and I'm looking forward to our conversation. Thank you very much for making the time available. You're welcome. And by the way, the best time to come to San Francisco without the fog is in September and October.
00:03:58
Speaker
But that is the time that I visited San Francisco. Oh, you just had bad luck. but ah I often do when it comes to travel, often do. The reason for the fog there is the ocean off the Pacific Ocean is typically I think average is about 56 degrees Fahrenheit year round.
00:04:19
Speaker
And in the summertime, when the Central Valley heats up, the air rises because it's warmer and sucks in the cold air off the ocean, which then gets raised up over the hills along the peninsula. And it hits the dew point and it condensates into fog. That tendency of overheating in the Central Valley tends to go down in September and October.
Political Campaigns and Joining HP
00:04:43
Speaker
That led to Mark Twain, the humorist that wrote Huckleberry Finn, and he was a ah journalist. He says the coldest winter he ever spent was the summer in San Francisco. it this was It was a strange place, but a beautiful place and fantastic people. I had a great time whilst I was there. That was brilliant. But please could we start ah the well please could you explain a little bit about your career and how you ended up in the position that you're in now?
00:05:13
Speaker
Well, I went to an engineering school at the University of Michigan, ah majoring first in aerospace and then in interdisciplinary engineering, whose goal was to develop technically trained managers.
00:05:26
Speaker
I was a pilot by the time I got to school, and I was surprised that Michigan did not have a flying club. So I started one called the University of Michigan Flyers. It's still going very well today, has three or 400 members, has trained over 5,000 pilots, many of which turned out to be airline pilots for the major airlines, including the top pilot for the Blue Angels, the, the flighting demonstration team.
00:05:54
Speaker
The blue angels would be a bit like the ah RAF's red arrows. Freshman year in college in my sophomore year. My aerospace engineer, Professor Wilbur Nelson came to me and said the supersonic transport was in trouble in Congress. Would I be willing to organize a nationwide student organization called Fly America's SST or FAST? And not only what I got was going to get myself into, I ended up but doing though had about 40 chapters of 15,000 members on campuses throughout the country.
00:06:28
Speaker
and spending a month of my time in Washington, walking the halls of Congress, lobbying for this technological innovation called supersonic flight.
Marketing the First Hard Disk at Apple
00:06:37
Speaker
After that, I took the organization to support science and technology to Washington, D.C., lobbied Congress for the space shuttle, and I was successful on that.
00:06:49
Speaker
lobby Congress for project independence and to move more towards alternative sources of energy. And I was largely unsuccessful with that. Then I went to the Environmental Balance Association of Minnesota, pioneered the field of ah environmental mediation. Then I got involved in politics and ended up running a gubernatorial campaign where we were successful in winning and then running John Conley's presidential campaign. And we got four more delegates the in Minnesota that he got in the first primary in New Hampshire. We got four and he got zero in New Hampshire.
00:07:27
Speaker
And HP recruited me and brought me out to California to help them site new facilities. I was surprised that the corporate PR department did not have word processing because I had word processing all the way dating back to my FAST organization and through the Environmental Balance Association and through my clinical campaigns. So I introduced an internal word processing program to the corporate PR department, which at the time, this was 1980, was the only department of the company that knew how to type. And that enabled me to move laterally, which is something HP supported, into product management in the office systems group. And then Apple recruited me from there
00:08:13
Speaker
to bring to market the first hard disk drive for a personal computer, the Apple profile, it was really cheap, it was only $3,500, and it was tremendous space, five megabytes in space, which is about the amount of space we just consumed in the last 30 seconds in this podcast.
00:08:32
Speaker
ye I noticed that I knew how to manage because I had managed those organizations I mentioned earlier, and the political campaigns. So they asked me to take over as the business unit, or first as the group product manager for the Apple III product line.
00:08:48
Speaker
And about a weekend to that job, after being told I would be given 18 months to make the product successful, ah Steve Jobs took the executive committee off to a retreat in Pahara Dunes, California near Monterey on the coast about 60 miles south of San Francisco. And he convinced the executive committee to cancel the Apple III product line.
00:09:11
Speaker
About a week later, I was coming out of corporate headquarters with nothing to do since my product line had been canceled. And Ida Cole ran out and grabbed me and said, Dave, John Scully, the president wants to talk to you. So I went into a meeting with Scully and he says, Dave, we've got a problem. We've got $20 million worth of piece parts for the Apple III spread between Cork, Ireland, Dallas, Texas, and Singapore manufacturing facilities.
00:09:38
Speaker
What should we do about it? And I said, what do you mean we pale face? He laugh, so I had to explain the joke to him. that below it separate It's a Bob Hope joke, isn't it? ah It might be, I don't know. But the the Lone Ranger was galloping through the Arizona desert with his Indian sidekick, Tato. And when I tell this story to Indians, I have to say an American Indian sidekick, Tato.
00:10:08
Speaker
And the Lone Ranger turns to Tato and says, Tato, these Indians have surrounded us and all they want to do is scalp us. What should we do? And Tato says, what do you mean we pale face? Maybe he's a white man and they want to scalp us, not another American Indian. So
Apple's Management Values and the Apple III
00:10:24
Speaker
Scully then didn't giggle and he says, well, what should we do? I said, well, you know, you gave me all the responsibility for the product line, which is not only the Apple III, the company had sold 50,000 of them by that point in time.
00:10:37
Speaker
But you don't give me any authority. You don't give me any budget for the advertising. I can't control any of the promotions. And I told him the story of having to go through eight layers of management in order to get a promotion out out to the hands of the sales force in the independent dealers, which was our distribution system.
00:10:55
Speaker
And he's and on then I told him the story of the IBM PC, the story of Kelly Johnson's gun corks, the story of soul of a new machine. And that if you give me the authority commensurate with the responsibility, we'll be able to go out there and market and sell these things.
00:11:15
Speaker
So this was very important in terms of the values and of Apple at the time. And Scully says, yeah, he's a neighbor of his was the president of Xerox when he used to be president of Pepsi America in Connecticut. And ada I think it was in New York, upstate New York.
00:11:37
Speaker
and he had had him over at a cocktail party and he asked the president of Xerox and asked him how come they didn't have a personal copier like Cannon does. And the president of Xerox said that Cannon put 10 of their best engineers on it. They're shipping now. Xerox put 100 of their engineers on it. They're still a year away from shipping. So that's the value of an independent business unit.
00:12:02
Speaker
A couple weeks later, I was asked to put together a proposal, which I did and presented it on July 15th, 1985. And the climax of the meeting was I laid out five alternatives, including let the market decide and including what Steve Jobs wanted to do, and that's cancel the product line.
00:12:24
Speaker
And Floyd Kwame, who is the vice president of Apple for sales and marketing at the time, asked me if a dealer called me, and they yeah the executive committee decided to cancel the product line, or if the executive committee allows the market to decide what would I say.
00:12:41
Speaker
I said, well, I tell the guy or gal that if you let the market decide that as long as you continue as a dealer selling and servicing and supporting and trading on the Apple three, which, by the way, was a business office computer, the company will continue to do that.
00:12:58
Speaker
But if you decide to cancel the product line, I'll give them your phone number, Floyd. And the executive committee laughed because one of Apple's values is good management. Another one was excellence and quality. Another one was innovation, vision. Another one is a positive social ah contribution.
Role as Independent Business Unit Manager
00:13:20
Speaker
And lastly, and most importantly, empathy for the customers. And if it canceled the product line, it would be in violation of the values that everybody knew that Apple stood for. And then if they cancel it, that's something Floyd would have to explain to the dealer why the company val of but invalidates its own set of values. yeah So they called me a couple of weeks, a week later, and asked me to take over as the independent business unit manager, or BUM for short, as opposed to general manager.
00:13:53
Speaker
They said, I can head count of 17 people, $4 million. dollars I could side for anything up to $200,000 without asking for any other approvals. And we went to town and we sold 25,000 Apple 3s, generated enough profit to help finance the development of the Macintosh and keep about 1,000 to 1,500 employees employed at Apple. ah We were doing what was later called by the Boston Consulting Group, a cash cow.
00:14:22
Speaker
And then the product lied down on the same day that the Apple 2C was announced. So the stock price would not be affected. And we successfully ended the life of that product. And I transferred many of the Apple 3 developers over to the Macintosh so that they would not lose their investments in their the products that they've developed.
00:14:43
Speaker
Cool. You've mentioned names of products, which like I didn't really associate with Apple at all, so to speak. For me, Apple is the iPhone and I this, either, or the i the other. But i the Apple organization goes back an awful long way and really was at the forefront of the development of personal computers and business computers.
00:15:06
Speaker
Yes, and thinking out of the box and then innovation. It was started in 1978 by Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs and another person with first the Apple One, which Wozniak had designed, and then the Apple Two, which took off and IBM did not get into the marketplace until about two or three years later. And then the Apple Three, which corrected the problems with the Apple Two for the office and business market.
00:15:35
Speaker
And then there was an attempt at a graphical user interface with a product called Visa, but it was mispositioned in the marketplace in terms of what it could do and where the value proposition was. And then there was the Macintosh, which was in but in announced in January of 1984 at the and a Super Bowl ad.
00:15:56
Speaker
They shipped 100,000 Macs, primarily to developers. Then the developers found out that with only 128K of memory, with 64 being used up by the screen and the rest by the operating system, the largest program they could write would be 10 kilobytes. So there was not much you could do with it. And the Macintosh sales dropped to four units in January of 1985.
00:16:22
Speaker
And within six months, Steve Jobs was fired and he left the company. And then the whole sort of new story started with Pixar and eventually returning to Apple.
Lessons from Steve Jobs on Product Cannibalization
00:16:33
Speaker
Well, then after he left Apple, he started a new computer company, which he called Next, and mispositioned that in the marketplace. So that failed, but the operating system for that continued.
00:16:48
Speaker
And then he had acquired Pixar and that was having all kinds of problems. So what I found in research for my book, Building and Sailing Rate Products, that he sought out David Packard, one of the co-founders of Hewlett Packard. And Dave, who I knew personally because I used to handle his PR when he was chair of the board of HP.
00:17:10
Speaker
ah Dave taught him about the importance of cannibalizing your own products. Hence later, the iPhone cannibalized the iPod, and Steve was not trying to kill the iPod like he was trying to kill the Apple III, the Apple II, and the Lisa for his Macintosh. So he learned a good lesson from Packard there. And Packard, I think, also taught him the importance of values like the HPA and Apple values, which had been adopted back in 1978 or so.
The SPICE System for Product Development
00:17:39
Speaker
When he came back to Apple, along with his operating system, which was then put on the Macintosh, it actually enabled the Macintosh to actually work and work well as it transitioned from the 6800 microprocessor to the Intel microprocessors. And also he was able to learn to cannibalize his own products. And the company is one of the most valuable, if not the most valuable company in the world for many years now.
00:18:09
Speaker
Yes. All of that experience that you've then brought together in the spice catalyst and you've been so explaining to people how to make insanely great products with my HR hat on. One of the things that I'm very interested in is within this whole sort of process of creating insanely great products. How does, how does it all come together with the people?
00:18:35
Speaker
Well, I've boiled down the keys to success for products, and for that matter, services. Services is a product also. It's a tangible product. So when I say product, you can also think services. and I brought it down to a mnemonic, which is a pity made in the first word of my company's name, SPICE. S stands for product market strategy, and there's 32 components of that.
00:18:59
Speaker
And all of those components need to be researched and studied and decisions made upon by people. The P stands for a repeatable process. One company a few years ago that I consulted with put out five products, all five products mailed in the marketplace. And I asked them if they had a framework for product development.
00:19:23
Speaker
Uh, and with I, that they repeated and they said, no, they did something different every time. And the VP of product management there says, yeah, that leads to the lack of a repeatable process leads to a culture of blame. So that's where people come in again. They start blaming each other, but they should have come up with a repeatable process.
00:19:43
Speaker
The I in SPICE stands for information, getting the information needed in order to get the job done. C is understanding the customer, what it is that they want to do, 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 for them to get it done, and then how satisfied are they with the current way of of getting it done.
00:20:06
Speaker
The goal is people have to do that research by observing, by interviewing, by surveying, by doing big data and analytics to identify what it is that people want to do and to identify 15 unmet needs before you ship the product. Otherwise, if you're too early or too late, you've got problems. So you wait until those 15 unmet needs open up.
00:20:31
Speaker
And then when they start closing up, that's when you start transitioning to a cash cow and don't invest anymore in any further ah product enhancements. And lastly, the E is the people. It's the employees. And in order for an organization, whether it's one person or a million people, to be successful ah amongst all of the employees and staff and consultants,
00:20:55
Speaker
you have to have a competency in 130 different skill or competency areas, which is quite a lot. And I have them detailed in my book, a successful product design and management toolkit, which was published by the Wiley a couple of years ago.
00:21:12
Speaker
There's a couple of things that I like to pick up about that. Cause one of the things is what's the name of the company? Why call it spice? But there's this, they, you've explained that particularly well there and it all fits together. But if it would pick up on like the customer aspect where you say a customer needs, you need to find customers with 15 unmet needs. And that then becomes the product that you develop to meet those needs.
00:21:39
Speaker
Right. And then once you've met those needs and those needs start to disappear or change, you then convert your product from being the innovative product to being, ah I suppose you could say the conventional, the traditional product which people are buying because it's reliable,
00:21:58
Speaker
It does what it says on the tin, so to speak, and it becomes like a this term, the cash cow, that just the the steady income earner, but you're not actually reinvesting income, or you're not reinvesting in the development of that product anymore. You moved on to the next one.
Identifying Customer Needs and Innovation
00:22:16
Speaker
So right it's this constant research of what the customer needs, which is the thing that so like jumps out at me, like how many organizations decide what the customer wants or what the customer will need. And how does the customer know that they need it until it's possible, until you've told them that it's possible? ah They don't. um There's a story that Henry Ford, the inventor of the affordable automobile,
00:22:45
Speaker
ask What about asking people if they would like to have a car or an automobile? And people said, no, I want a faster horse. If he had sat on the stoop of ah one of the saloons in Dearborn, not far from where I grew up in Detroit, and just observed people beating their horses ah to get through town faster, he would have said, oh, they want a faster horse. And that's perhaps part of the reason why he eventually called it a horseless carriage, not an automobile or a car. yeah They also didn't have big data if say the internet existed and he wanted to find keywords on problems people were researching um and people at that time put on put in how many people were searching for auto or how many people were searching for cars you probably would have found nobody searching for them and the reason for that is.
00:23:34
Speaker
If someone could tell you what they wanted or needed, they first have to understand that they have a problem. And then they have to invent the solution themselves. And then they could say, okay, this is the solution I want for this problem that I have figured out that I have. And most people can't do that.
00:23:53
Speaker
That's why I advocate going out um observing, interviewing, and surveying people and or if you're selling to other companies, other prospective customers, companies that are on your target market list to get gain insights and answers to those questions.
00:24:09
Speaker
What you're really talking about, I suppose, is that the importance of understanding the what the customer wants, what the customer needs, but the customer doesn't know about it.
Historical Technological Adoption Examples
00:24:19
Speaker
Are you guiding the customer through the process of understanding what the solution could be when you say they've got to decide what the solution should be? You've got to be involved in helping them identify what the solution is. No, what I'm saying is you have to start at a more granular base level.
00:24:38
Speaker
in terms of what it is that the customer wants to do, why they want to do it, when they want to do it, where they want to do it, and so forth. So it's the outcome it's the outcome that what you are developing will enable the customer to achieve, not the actual process itself. It's the outcome of the that the product delivers, not the product itself that is important. Precisely.
00:25:03
Speaker
It's a really very interesting idea and and thinking about that in the context of the organizations that you have worked in. I mean, when you talk about word processing in the year 1980, I can remember when working in an office where the first word processor arrived and this ability to not have to type every part of the letter again. You had this saved document and you could put in the bits that were different and it would print it out and it printed out a million times if you wanted it to. That was it's like, everybody was really surprised and shocked that that was possible. and The people who operated, they were paid more money because they were word processor people rather than typing people. But it's interesting to sort of put
00:25:57
Speaker
that into the context of what you're saying about customers because before that you'd have a letter that had been typed, you'd photocopier a thousand times and then the typist would type the name and address and the individual details into the letter and It'd never be quite aligned with it. So the outcome that you want from the word processor is to be able to present things in a better way, to be able to do them quicker, to be able to do them for in more detail, and to create a product that is looks as if it's been produced specifically for the person that's names on that document.
00:26:39
Speaker
Exactly.
Conclusion and Future Invitations
00:26:40
Speaker
and But the customer who eventually ended up using that product, the word processor would not have understood, didn't know anything about word processor, didn't know anything about computers or anything like that. It was just, you know, we didn't have computers. We had typing pools, not computers.
00:27:01
Speaker
And the recipient of that letter thought that the letter was typed individually just for them. Yeah, that that's part that enhanced the use of the organization's reputation and and relationship with the person who received the letter from them.
00:27:17
Speaker
It's some really very interesting that to actually, from my own career experience of being someone who was producing information that would then go into these letters and then they were put into word processing letters to actually relate that back to your career as like the person who was introducing it and making it happen is like, yeah, it doesn't sound like much, but it's actually really, really slight This, yeah, left me thinking an awful lot. And it's been, yeah the time has flown, but it's been really, really very interesting. I hope that we can come back again and talk about the other aspects of the spice system, the spice catalyst system. It would be great if we could. i'd be happy That's great. But for the time being, you know, David, thank you very much. I really do appreciate the time that you've spent with me today. It's been great. Thank you.
00:28:15
Speaker
Lovely being with you. Thank you. I am Michael Millward, the managing director of Abecedah, and I have been having a conversation with the independent mind, David Fradin, who is a product success specialist. You can find out more about both of us at abecedah.co.uk. There's a link in the description.
00:28:36
Speaker
I must remember to thank the team at matchmaker dot.fm for introducing me to David. If you are a podcast looking for interesting guests, or if like David, you have something very interesting to say matchmaker dot.fm is where matches of great hosts and great guests are made. There is a link to matchmaker and an offer code in the description.
00:28:56
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. 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. All that remains for me to say is until the next episode of The Independent Minds, thank you for listening and goodbye.