The Accidental Product Manager: Recent Episodes
Jim Anderson
Managing a product is not just a business, it’s a science. Nobody knows more about the science of product management than Dr. Jim Anderson.
As Dr. Anderson says “I don’t embrace excuses from product managers about why their products are not successful, I embrace solutions.”
Over the last 25 years, Dr. Anderson has transformed failing products worldwide. Dr. Anderson will turn these money pits into money makers. Welcome to the premier blog for learning how to develop, launch, and manage wildly successful products.
For a product to be successful, it takes an entire company working together. Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
Just in case you didn’t know it, ordering food to be delivered to your home has exploded in the past few years.
More and more customers are going online and placing orders for food that they expect to show up at their home quickly. For the product managers who are working at the restaurants that are providing all of this food, times have been tough. As the number of orders has been increasing, the restaurant’s ability to create and ship that much food has been strained. What the product managers need is more kitchen space.
They are starting to think that they may have found a new place to build more of what they need.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
In order to be a successful product manager, often we will have to use our product development definition to find partners for our company to work with.
Once we’ve entered into an agreement with them, in order for our product to be a success, both partners have to do their part. This is all fine and good until the day that you discover that your partner has gone bankrupt. If that happens, what does it mean for your partnership?
What does it mean for your partner?
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
When you want to get a cup of coffee, where do you go? In the U.S., most of us generally head to a Starbucks.
It turns out that if we were in China, this is also something that we can do – Starbucks has expanded until they are just about everywhere in China. However, as Starbucks has become more and more successful, other firms have seen this and have decided that they want to start to offer coffee in China. The Starbucks product managers are now starting to face more competition for business in China than they have ever experienced before.
What should they do with their product development definition now?
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
If you were the product manager for a new social media app, what would your #1 goal be every day when you went to work?
There is only one answer to that question: to sign up more users for you app. Social media is all about growth. There are a number of new social media apps that are being created by Chinese companies (who else would know about what appeals to millions of people?) and they think that they may have found an untapped market.
The product managers for these Chinese companies are going after users in India where there are millions of people just waiting to discover the next big social media app.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
You would think that if you were a product manager at one of the world’s largest retail companies, getting into a new line of business would not be all that hard to do.
I mean your company has deep pockets and can probably spend a lot of money to do whatever everyone else in this new market is doing. The result isn’t if you are going to be successful, it’s really more a question of just how successful you are going to be.
As Walmart has gotten into the home grocery delivery business, their product managers have discovered that even being big may not be enough to ensure that they will be a success.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
You would think that being a burger product manager would be a fairly simple job: you get the burger, you make the burger, you sell the burger.
However, once upon a time it might have been that simple; however, these days it has become much more complicated. If you can ignore for a moment the fact that you are facing a great deal of competition, it now turns out that your customer’s tastes are changing.
Burger product managers have a challenge on their hands and they are going to have to get creative and change their product development definition.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
Advertising product managers are always looking for the next “big thing”.
The advertising market has its ups and downs as customer’s needs, wants, and moods change seemingly overnight. These product managers have the responsibility to keep their eyes open all the time searching for the new ways that they can expand their product development definition and help the firms that manufacture goods get their message in front of their next customer.
Right now what these product managers are doing is turning their attention to what they hope will be the next new engine of growth for the industry: direct-to-consumer marketers.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
The product managers at Facebook are facing a serious challenge.
They have to find ways to expand their product development definition and make Facebook more interesting and relevant to their visitors. One great way to make this happen is to provide Facebook visitors with access to current news. This is easy to do on the national and international scale – there are a lot of sources of that news.
However, what the product managers are discovering is that getting local news can be a really tough job.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
Just imagine if you were a cigarette product manager.
You are responsible for a product that is both addictive and reviled. You’ve been doing quite well for yourself for a very long time; however, now things are starting to change. Young people seem to getting the message and are less likely to start to use your products. At the same time, a new type of smoking product, vaping, has shown up and seems to be doing very well.
What is a product manager to do?
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
Anyone who has a baby can tell you that they spend a lot of time giving their baby baths.
When they do this, they require special products – things like baby shampoo. Surprise, surprise, it turns out that the market for baby products is huge. One of the biggest players in this market is a company that we have all probably heard of: Johnson & Johnson (J&J). They have been around for a very long time and providing baby products is something that they are well known for. However, lately their market share in this critical market has been decreasing.
What’s going wrong and what can J&J’s product managers do about it?
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
So what’s a product manager supposed to do when your biggest product has been discontinued?
This is the challenge that was facing the Airbus product managers. The company had been building the massive A380 airplane that they had created in order to compete with Boeing’s 747 airplane. However, the market for that type of aircraft dried up and went away. When this happened Airbus was left with an airplane, but no market for it. This caused the Airbus product managers to have to change their product development definition and go back to their drawing boards and come up with a new plan.
What they needed to do was figure out how Airbus could continue to grow and be successful when they no longer had their premier product to offer.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
Think about your favorite non-water drink right now.
What color is it? When you pour it into a glass, it looks the way that it should – you can recognize it. In fact, when you drink it, it probably tastes the way that it looks. What if all of this could be changed. What if your favorite drink suddenly became clear? No, the taste would not be changed at all, it would just all of sudden look like water. Would you still want it?
Some product managers are betting that you would say yes.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
It almost goes without saying that we all know about Amazon – the book seller who has turned into the seller of just about everything.
What you may not know about Amazon is that they decided a while back to that they were going to enter into the lucrative video gaming market. With the power of Amazon behind you, you’d think that there was no way that they could ever not be successful. However, so far things have not gone the way that the Amazon product managers had wanted it to go.
What are they going to have to do to turn their product development definition around?
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
In order to make sure that people want to buy their products, product managers have to stay on top of changes in the technology that people use to make payments.
This used to be fairly easy: once upon a time everyone used cash, then they migrated to using credit and debit cards, next came PayPal and the like. Over in China product managers are once again moving forward in the area of payments and they are making changes to their product development definition.
Chinese product managers are trying to get people to put their mobile phones away and make payments using facial recognition systems.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
What a wonderful time we are living in!
With the arrival of the internet, all of sudden there is no longer a reason for any of us to have to go out to a restaurant any more. Instead, all we have to do is to bring up one of those online ordering applications, select what we want, and then greet the driver when they show up at our front door. What could be better?
Unfortunately, what product managers are starting to discover is that the brave new world of unlimited food delivery comes with some downsides.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
If you were a product manager at Walmart’s Sam’s Club, there is one thing that would keep you up at night: Costco.
You’d know that your product development definition was broken because the customers that you wanted to come into your Sam’s Club stores all too often were heading over to shop at Costco. The people that you needed to be shopping in your store were well-to-do shoppers who would be willing to spend a lot at your store. However, the people that you were getting were the Walmart customers who traditionally were seeking bargains. This is not going to look good on anyone’s product manager resume. The well-to-do shoppers were all heading over to Costco.
What’s a product manager to do?
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
At the end of a long day, many people like to go home and spend the evening losing themselves in playing video games on their home entertainment systems.
Games for these systems have grown into a big business. In the past, when these people were away from home, they couldn’t play their games. However, that is now starting to change. Videogame product managers are starting extend their product development definition and bring more of their complex, graphics-intense hits for consoles and high-end computers to mobile devices.
How can game product managers be successful doing this?
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
You would think that being a product manager for a hot new start-up beverage would be a great job, right?
Somewhat surprisingly, you’d be wrong. It turns out that it’s fairly easy to come up with the idea for a new beverage – it it has health benefits then it is ever easier, but it is then hard to be a product manager that is able to figure out the product development definition that will get your new drink beverage to catch on. This market is littered with the remains of companies that showed up and then just faded away.
What does a product manager have to do in order to make their new drink product a success?
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
There is no question that Amazon is a successful company.
If you were a product manager who worked at Amazon you would be under a great deal of pressure to find ways for the company to make more money. One way that they would like to bring in more revenue is to start to sell high end products.
It turns out that this is harder than it may have originally looked to them…
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
When you think about all of the products that product managers are responsible for, there are a number of them that come to mind as being “difficult” products to successfully manage.
For one reason or another, these products are difficult to talk about and therefore are difficult to market. In this category go condoms, guns, doughnuts, and, of course, cigarettes. However, there is a new product on the market that probably belongs in this category but it’s so new that nobody is really sure yet.
I’m talking about e-cigarettes and product manager’s plans to expand their product development definition and market them using social media.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
So I’m willing to bet that you are pretty proud of your product.
You believe that you are using your product development definition to provide your customers with a high quality product that can meet their needs better than any other product that is currently on the market. This is all fine and good as long as the product that you are delivering is truly high quality. It can only be high quality if it is built out of high quality parts.
What is a product manager to do if they suddenly discover that some of the parts that are going into their product are NOT high quality?
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
At one point in time, being a Peloton product manager must have felt like having the best job in the world.
It seemed like everyone had fallen in love with the pricy stationary bike and video subscription service. The product was literally flying off the shelves. However, things changed. Oh yeah, there was that pandemic thing. Then there was a botched new product introduction. These days things are not looking so great over at Peloton.
What went wrong for these product managers?
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
You would think that a business as well established as the cosmetic business would not see a lot of disruption.
I mean, customers try products, select the ones that they like, and that’s the end of the story, right? Well, it turns out that in the cosmetics business product managers at some of the smaller firms are in the process of changing how things are done.
This is big news because they are going after the next generation of cosmetics buyers: the millennials.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
If there is one job that most of us would agree that we would not like to have these days, it’s any job in which we would be going up against Amazon.
They have spread into so many different areas that it is becoming harder and harder to avoid competing with them.
However, there is one product manager who works at an independent bookstore that has found a way to not only survive, but also to thrive even as they sell to the same customers that Amazon does.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
Product managers who are responsible for selling alcohol are in a bit of a bind these days.
For some reason, perhaps because of everyone’s health kick, sales of alcohol have been declining over the past few years. Today’s millennials are just not buying as much beer, wine, and hard liquor as their parents once did. This news is sad for alcohol product managers. However, there is some good news for them. It turns out that some of the fastest growing alcohol drinks in the U.S. are called “alcopops”. The product development definition for these drinks defines a strong, sugary alcoholic soda that is targeted towards younger drinkers.
Could these be the products that alcohol product managers need to save their market?
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
Can anyone besides me remember back in the day when you wanted to play a video game and you’d stuff your pockets with quarters and head on down to the video parlor?
Those days are now long gone and you can play great games almost anywhere without spending a penny. However, although you might not pay to play anymore, getting that game into your house can end up costing you a pretty penny.
Just exactly how are video game product managers going about pricing their products?
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
Just in case you didn’t know it, Gucci is a one of the largest and most successful fashion brands out there.
Everyone wants to both own and be seen wearing Gucci apparel. In the past few years, Gucci has had a fantastic run and has become one of the hottest brands in fashion. However, their growth has recently cooled off a bit. It turns out that their product managers forgot what was in their product development definition and made a product mistake that this has ended up having huge ramifications online where Gucci had been doing very well.
What went wrong?
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
Every product manager wants their customers to be able to buy their product when they decide to make a purchase.
The worst thing in the world that could happen is that your customer is ready to buy and you have nothing to offer to them. Grocery store product managers are facing a situation like this. Product shortfalls are forcing them to have to get creative. Their goal is to be able to present their customers with full shelves.
What kind of magic is this going to require?
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
I can only speak for myself, but it seems as though anytime I walk into a store that sells food, there is some sort of sticker on the door that proclaims that if I’d prefer to have my food brought to me, there is a service that will do it.
What a fantastic age we now live in! The product managers at these food delivery services are working hard to try to establish their new market while fending off all of the other companies that are doing the same thing that they are.
However, there is a fundamental problem that they are all dealing with: their customers are not turning into repeat customers.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
So here’s a quiz for you: if you were going to buy a TV, how would you go about doing it?
If you are like most of us, you’d go look online, find the model that you wanted, and then order it online. The idea of going to a store and picking one out is something that a lot of us no longer consider. Product managers for stores are starting to realize this and they are starting to look at their product development definition and make adjustments to meet the new world that they find themselves living in.
What’s happening is that stores are now being transformed into warehouses.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
Let’s face it, today when you see a car on the road you expect to see a person sitting behind the wheel.
However, if some very smart product managers have their way, in the future you might be seeing driverless cars whizzing around. This is all brand new stuff, but there have been a number of very large investments being made in companies that make robotic delivery vehicles that are driverless.
Will their product managers be able to solve all of the challenges that will be coming with this new technology?
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
I’d like to tell you that the calling to become a product manager is only received by those of us with the highest morals.
However, I really can’t say that. What this means is that in the world of product managers, there are the good ones and the not so good ones. I like to spend my time talking about what the goods ones are able to accomplish. However, every so often the bad ones do something that is so clearly bad that I feel compelled to talk about it.
It turns out that some of the bad ones work for Greenway Health and they have done some bad things.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
If you’d like to sign up for a challenging product manager job, then perhaps you’d like to look into what it would take to become the product manager for a mall.
Back in the day, malls where where everyone in town would go to do their shopping. They had movie theaters, food courts, and, of course, plenty of parking. However, times have changed. Now people do more shopping online and we don’t seem to be heading out to the mall nearly as often as we used to. Clearly it is time for mall product managers to update their product development definition.
What’s a mall product manager to do in order to keep their product alive?
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
So product manager, how do you measure how successful you are being?
If you are like most of us, if you are always on the move and always have things that you need to be doing you are probably feeling pretty good about how things are going for both your product and your company. However, in the world of food delivery services, their product managers are running around like chickens with their heads cut off and yet they are still not being profitable. Something is wrong with their product development definition.
What are they doing wrong?
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
The arrival of the Covid-19 virus has upended the lives of most of our customers.
Many people have lost their jobs and just about everyone has been forced to stay home. The result of all of this is that our customers are starting to feel “cash poor” – they are looking for ways to save money on everything that they buy.
What this means for product managers is that we need to make some changes to our product development definition in order to appeal to our newly price conscious customers.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
So product manager, what does your product look like?
No, I mean when your customer first has a chance to get their hands on their version of your product, what does it look like? Does it show up in a nondescript cardboard box? Is it in an unremarkable container?
You do realize how very important first impressions are, right?
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
Product managers for food products are facing a couple of different challenges right now.
The first is that the cost of making food is currently rising. This means that their products are becoming more expensive even without them doing anything. The other problem that they are facing is that they are facing tough competition – other companies are making food products that are similar to theirs. Just like product managers everywhere, food product managers are under pressure to look at their product development definition in order to find ways to boost their profits.
They think that they may have found a way to make this happen.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
Let’s face it, being a product manager for a movie theater chain was not an easy job before the Covid-19 virus showed up.
Netflix and other streaming services were cutting into people’s desire to go out and purchase movie tickets. Now that the virus has arrived, movie theaters have been closed and even more people have become comfortable sitting at home watching TV instead of going to the movies. It looks like these product managers have a real challenge in front of them.
How are they going to change their product development definition in order to get customers to come back to the movies?
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
Once upon a time it used to be easy to be a restaurant product manager.
Your #1 job was to find ways to get more people to come to your restaurant to eat. You could offer discounts, have special events, and even add unique things to your menu. However, then times changed. That internet thing arrived and all of sudden your customers are all walking around with their faces buried in their mobile phones and nobody comes out to restaurants nearly as much as they used to. However, what people do now is to order meals to go. This is good news for restaurant product managers; however, it comes with a catch that is causing them to rethink their product development definition.
What apps are your customers using to order their food?
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
Restaurant product managers have a difficult job these days.
It has always been a challenge to get people to come to your restaurant and spend money. However, with the arrival of food delivery services that will now take a restaurant’s food to anyone’s home, things have become even more complicated and it may be time for them to change their product development definition. The challenge and expense of running a restaurant while at the same time trying to make money from supporting a take-out operation has become a very challenging thing for any product manager to do.
That’s why some product managers have come up with a radical new way to solve their problems.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
Who doesn’t love a good sandwich?
When lunch time rolls around (or perhaps dinner), there is something about grabbing a meal that you can hold in your hand that can be oh so satisfying. When it comes time for us to have a sandwich there are a lot of different options for us: we can make our own or we can go out and buy one. If we decide to go out and get a sandwich, then where should we go? Restaurants that make sandwiches are pretty easy to set up and so there are a lot of them out there.
The product managers at one such restaurant, Potbelly’s, are struggling to come up with ways to change their product development definition in order to make their sandwich different from all the others.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
Grocery product managers are starting to face a real problem.
More and more of their business is starting to be driven by customers going online and ordering food and then expecting it to show up at their door. What this means for these product managers is that the old way of doing business, building more grocery stores, is no longer going to work in the future.
Product managers are going to have to change their product development definition and find ways to keep up with the changing times.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
Being a product manager in a growth industry is one of the best jobs that any of us can have.
Everyday things seem to be rushing forward faster and faster, it’s all that we can do to keep up. This is exactly how life must be for product managers who are involved in the fracking industry. Just in case you don’t know, fracking is the process of injecting liquid at high pressure into subterranean rocks, boreholes, etc. so as to force open existing fissures and extract oil or gas. This technique has opened up vast new areas of land for drilling for gas and oil. A product management job in this industry has been one to have for a long time.
However, now things are changing and these product managers have a problem on their hands: sand.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
Product managers are starting to discover that something that we may have stopped thinking about in this digital age is still very, very important.
Even as more and more of our customers are buying things online, it turns out that they still go out and go shopping. When they do this, they want to see and touch the things that they are going to be buying in a store.
What this means for product managers is that store shelves are still a very important place for our products to be.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
The life of a freezer product manager is generally fairly boring.
Your product development definition tells you to create more and more efficient products in order to replace the older units that your customers are using. You replace the ones that wear out and you are always looking for new customers. However, with the arrival of the Covid-19 vaccines that have to be kept very cold, all of a sudden the demand for freezers, and a lot of them, has exploded.
How are freezer product managers going to deal with their new found popularity?
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
As product managers we are always being told that we need to better understand our customers. We believe that if we were to truly understand them, then we would know how to offer them the products that they want, when they want them, and where they want them. In the world of retail products this is especially true. It turns out that there is a special type of product manager who just may have figured out a new product development definition that allows them to do all of these things at once. Who is this person you ask? Why it’s a pop-up product manager.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
One of the things that every product manager would like to have would be a guaranteed customer base.
We’d all love to know that there was a group of customers out there that really needed our products and would probably always be buying from us. It turns out that there are a few markets that are like this. One that comes to mind is your local drugstore. If a customer needs a prescription filled, they’ll probably be going to their local drug store to have it taken care of. However, this market is starting to get competitive and the product managers at the drugstore chain CVS are going to have to do something about that.
What should they do?
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
How would you feel about taking on a challenge? Yes you say? Well good – I’ve got one for you. A very big one.
The companies that dig minerals out of the earth have a real problem on their hands. They use a lot of different vehicles to accomplish their work and currently all of these vehicles run exactly the same way that the car that you drive to work does – using a combustion engine. As you can well imagine, if you are operating in an enclosed underground area, the exhaust fumes are bad, the impact on the environment is bad, and the cost of keeping all of those vehicles running is bad.
These companies want a better solution and that’s what a group of product managers is trying to use their product development definition to provide them with.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
How would you feel about taking on a challenge? Yes you say? Well good – I’ve got one for you. A very big one.
The companies that dig minerals out of the earth have a real problem on their hands. They use a lot of different vehicles to accomplish their work and currently all of these vehicles run exactly the same way that the car that you drive to work does – using a combustion engine. As you can well imagine, if you are operating in an enclosed underground area, the exhaust fumes are bad, the impact on the environment is bad, and the cost of keeping all of those vehicles running is bad.
These companies want a better solution and that’s what a group of product managers is trying to use their product development definition to provide them with.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
Oh man! How great would it be to be a product manager at Starbucks?
I mean, they are the largest coffee chain going. It sure seems like there are new Starbucks stores popping up all over the place. In fact, sometimes when you are going down the road there will be a Starbucks on one side of the road and then you’ll see another Starbucks on the other side of the road! When you are part of an organization that is growing so fast, it can be a real challenge to keep things moving.
The Starbucks product managers have decided to do this by closing some of their existing stores.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
One of the most hotly contested markets right now is the home delivery of food.
In just about every major city, you can see multiple options for getting food delivered to you when you enter any restaurant. However, for those potential customers who live in smaller towns and cities, home delivery of food has not been an option – until now. Product managers are starting to view the smaller towns as the next battlefield now that they are already entrenched in the big cities.
How will they change their product development definition in order to capture these new customers?
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
Every product manager wants to be in charge of a product that customers want.
However, it turns out that some of us have to deal with situations in which our customers want what we have, but they are also afraid to give us what we need in order to deliver our product to them. A great example of this happening in the health care market.
Customers are very aware of the data privacy issues and so they are hesitant to use the health care products that the product managers are providing them with.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
The world that we live in is changing and what this means for product managers is that we need to find ways to change with it.
One area that is undergoing dramatic changes is how we go about fixing dinner. It used to be that you and I would either eat out or we’d go to the grocery store, pick up some ingredients, and then come home and make a meal. However, that has all changed now. The arrival of companies that make meal kits have created a system where we now get the ingredients that we need to make dinner delivered to our house and then we just have to spend a few minutes whipping up a delicious meal.
The challenge for the product managers at these meal kit companies is how to stay in business.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
If there is one new product that is currently red hot, it would be food delivery.
There are a bunch of brand new companies that seem to have shown up overnight who are now all vying to deliver food to our houses. Not wanting to get left behind in this booming market, Amazon has decided to roll out their own food delivery service. Amazon does so many different things so well that you would assume that this new service would be an instant hit. However, that is turning out to not be the case.
What are the Amazon product managers doing wrong?
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
If there is one job that most product managers would not want to have these days, it would to be a product manager for an independent book store.
I mean really, Amazon showed up several decades ago and pretty much put these guys out of business. Customers have become used to browsing for books on their computer and then pressing a button and either having a book show up in the mail the next day or having a Kindle electronic book instantly downloaded. Who needs to go out to a book store anymore?
However, independent bookstores are still in business and it’s because of what their product managers have done that they are still around.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
One of the fasting growing areas in retail right now has to do with the home delivery of food.
Just about everywhere that you go to eat, you probably see stickers plastered on the window saying that if you wanted to stay home and eat this location’s food, you could do it by calling one of several different home food delivery firms. What a wonderful age we are living in! However, it turns out that for the product managers who work at these food delivery firms, all is not so good.
They have a real challenge on their hands and they need to find out how to make their new business be financially successful.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
Pity the poor product managers at McDonalds!
They work for one of the most successful fast food restaurants on the planet and so they are charged with finding ways to make their business grow bigger and grow faster all the time. McDonalds is already a fairly smooth flowing operation that has years of experience in what works well. However, the competitive fast food market in which they are competing is changing and this means that McDonalds has to make changes to their product development definition and get better at what they are doing.
What changes will their product managers make?
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
As product managers, one of the most important things that we do is to use our product development definition to create products that our customers are going to want.
There are lot of different ways that we can go about doing this. We can place them in attractive packages, we can get celebrities to endorse them, and in the case of food products, we can make them taste good. This is why it is so strange that some product managers are currently working very hard to get people to try a new type of wellness shot that generally tastes very bad.
How is this going to look on anyone’s product manager resume?
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
The product managers at Facebook have real problem on their hands.
The company is so large and so successful, that in order to make it larger and more successful they have to come up with really big ideas. This means that they have to sit around and review their product development definition as they try to identify new products that can appeal to their over 2 billion users.
The Facebook product managers think that they’ve come up with something that is going to work: a new cryptocurrency called Libra.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
When you are thirsty, what kind of drink do you reach for?
A lot of us will grab a soda, a water, or maybe even a coffee or a tea. However, just a few years ago a new option showed up: favored bubbly water. The leader in this market category was a brand called LaCroix. The LaCroix product managers did very well for a long time. However, the popularity of their product has attracted new competitors and now the LaCroix product managers have to take a look at their product development definition and find ways to defend their market share.
What should they do to keep the fizz in their product sales?
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
Ok, so I’m willing to make a confession here.
I get a little thrill each and every time I come to the front door and see an Amazon box sitting there waiting for me to bring it into the house and open it up. It’s almost like Christmas day all over again! However, the product managers at Amazon have come to a realization that they need to find a way to save money. What they want to do is to find ways to ship things to their customers in fewer and smaller containers.
Are they going to be able to do this?
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
When it comes time for you to get some groceries, what do you do?
If you are like most of us, you jump into your car. Drive to the grocery store. Shop for what you want and buy it. Then you jump into your car again and drive home. It turns out that this is a really inefficient way of going about doing things and the product managers at grocery stores want to make some changes.
However, in order to make those changes they are first going to have to update their product development definition and invent some grocery delivery robots.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
In this wonderful modern age in which we are all living, just about anything can be purchased online.
However, there is a downside to this. You can’t touch online products. You can’t hold them in your hands and feel them. You can’t try them on. What’s missing from this whole online shopping experience is the ability to get close to the items that we are thinking about buying. Perhaps this is where the department store product managers could come in.
Do they hold the secret to getting online products into real customer’s hands?
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
The product managers at Amazon have a bit of a problem on their hands right now.
They have a popular voice activated device called Alexa that can play music, look up things on the web, add things to a shopping list and a lot of other things all using voice commands – no typing, no screen swiping. However, Alexa exists in a very competitive market. Google and Apple both have competing products. This means that the Amazon product managers have to do something to make their product unique.
They think that they may have come up with a great idea: health care data.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
Anyone who went to university knows all about Domino’s.
After a late night of studying, they were the ones that we’d all call to have a hot and tasty pizza delivered to us. What a lot of us may not know is that it was Domino’s that first made pizza popular in the U.S. back in the 1960’s. The pizza market is in the midst of undergoing a high tech transformation and its product managers are going to have to get ready to deal with a brave new world.
What kind of changes to their product development definition are they going to be facing and how will they deal with them?
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
I’m pretty sure that by now we all know who Amazon is.
They are the very large company that started out as a book seller and over time has morphed into a company that sells just about everything and seems to do just about everything. The Amazon product managers seem to have an almost golden touch when it comes to their product development definition – everything that they lay their hands on seems to be very successful. They have started offering the world’s most successful cloud service, they bought Whole Foods, and they have just launched one-day deliveries. However, it turns out that not everything that they do is successful.
A good example of this is their restaurant delivery business.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
As just about everyone knows, you can order anything from Amazon.
However, where a lot of us get a bit confused is just exactly how what we order actually gets to our doorstep. Yeah, yeah – for many of us Prime members we know that it will arrive in two days (or less), but just exactly how does it get there?
It turns out that the answer to that question has been bothering the Amazon product managers also and so they’ve taken a look at their product development definition and come up with an answer to this issue: Amazon is rolling out their own home delivery service.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
So if you want to go to a concert, a monster truck show, or a circus, who do you buy your tickets from?
If you are like most of us you would go online, go to a website run by Ticketmaster, and purchase your tickets. This is the way that we’ve always done it. Now things are getting ready to change.
The product managers at Ticketmaster are getting ready to face the first serious competition that they have had in decades. What makes this an even bigger deal is that the competition is being run by their ex-CEO!
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
Let’s face it: pandemics suck.
Your best laid plans for how you were going to boost the success of your product at the beginning of the year got turned on their heads. As a product manager, you still have the same goals, it’s just that the rules of the game seem to have been changed. What you are going to need is some way to try to understand this new world that we all find ourselves living in. You need more information.
Perhaps getting more data might be just exactly what you need to make it through this pandemic?
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
Grocery product managers have gone a long time without having to make any big changes.
However, in the past few years their job has become more and more challenging. The arrival of online shopping was in the process of fundamentally changing how their business was run. However, just to make things even more complex, the Covid-19 pandemic has changed how people shop for food.
This means that grocery product managers now have to make even more changes to their product development definition, and they have to make them fast!
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
When we think about burgers, one of the things that comes into just about everyone’s mind is the golden arches of McDonalds.
We think about McDonalds as the place that we can always go to get a burger. However, times are changing and people are starting to become more health conscious. They are also starting to think about global warming and the impact of raising all of those beef cattle can have on the environment. Taken together, these are all reasons that the product managers at McDonalds have decided that now is the time to make a change to their product development definition. Not just a little change, but a big change.
They are getting ready to roll out their new “McPlant” meatless burger.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
I don’t know about you, but I sure do like betting on a sure thing.
You know what I mean, it’s when you place a bet that you know is going to end up being a winner. The product managers at fast food restaurants thought that they had a sure thing to bet on: breakfast. I mean, we all have breakfast every morning and so getting people to drop by a fast food restaurant on their way into work and grab a quick breakfast sure seemed like a no-brainer, right?
Well, it turned out that this was a good bet – until the Covid-19 pandemic hit and turned everything upside down.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
Good news for product managers – nobody likes to get old!
In fact, nobody really likes to look like they are getting old. What this means for product managers is that there is a huge market for products that will allow us to avoid looking like we are getting older. One of the most successful of these products is called Botox and it’s an injection that you can get in your skin that will make your wrinkles disappear. Who wouldn’t want that? The Botox product managers have had a good run for a long time.
However, new competitors are now showing up and the Botox product managers are going to have to review their product development definition and take action if they want to remain successful.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
So just imaging this scenario: you are the product manager for a wildly successful mobile application.
In fact, your application is so successful that your company got bought by another much larger online company for a lot of money just a few years ago. That was all well and good, but the reason that you got bought was because that other company thought that you would eventually be able to make enough money to justify their investment in you.
As a product manager, how would you go about transforming your free-to-use service into a money making machine?
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
When lunch or dinner rolls around and you are hungry, what do you want to eat?
If you are like most of us, you start looking for a fast food restaurant where you can go get a good meal and get in and get out. A number of possibilities come to mind: McDonalds, Burger King, Wendy’s, etc. However, if you are like me, all of those possibilities are viewed as being boring and I’ve eaten there so many times my mouth does not get excited about the prospect of eating there again. That’s when, depending on where you live, you might start to think about Chick-fil-A. If so, then you’d be like an increasing number of restaurant goers who are visiting Chick-fill-A more and more.
What is the Chick-fil-A’s product manager’s secret to success?
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
Welcome to the era of Google and Facebook.
Product managers have had to learn to live in a world that is dominated by these firms. They control what the users of their applications see. Their algorithms determine what their users see in addition to all of the information that they are getting from friends and family. What product managers need is a better way to update their product development definition in order to get in contact with their potential customers.
Should we start to use email once again?
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
Everyone has to go out and buy groceries, right?
Well, it turns out that at one time that would have been a correct statement; however, these days things have changed and now customers have many choices on how they can get the groceries that they need. This change has hit grocery store product managers very hard. All of a sudden they find themselves having to change their product development definition, overhaul their operations, and having to invest in new technologies and talent in order to find ways to keep their customers from shopping at Amazon for their groceries. Oh, and they also have keep food prices low because that is what their customers expect.
How are grocery story product managers going to accomplish all of this?
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
Who among us could have predicted a Covid-19 pandemic would change our world in the ways that it has?
I’d be willing to guess that the answer to that question is none of us. However, as much of setback as these turns of events have been, there are some product managers who are doing well even now.
It turns out that these product managers had been preparing their product development definition for a different sort of future and the Covid-19 pandemic almost played into their hands.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
So what’s up with your customers?
Why are they so touchy? It sure seems like customers can very quickly become upset about something that wasn’t covered in your product development, definition and then fly off the handle and be in the streets waving signs and talking with television stations about how bad you are all in the space of a couple of hours. It has become clear that we product managers are now living in a different age and time than we used to. What we need to learn how to do is to deal with customers who have for some reason become very, very angry with either our product or our company.
When this happens, just exactly what is a product manager supposed to do?
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
Product managers know that making our customers fall in love with our stores, our staff, and our brand is a critical part of our ability to be successful.
This is why over the past few years there has been a big push by product managers to find ways to pamper our customers.
With the arrival of the Covid-19 pandemic, we now have to take a step back, change our product development definition, and find ways to keep our staff safe while still trying to connect with our customers.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
I think that we can all agree that the Covid-19 pandemic has been a very, very bad thing.
Just about every business was shut for a period of time and every product manager had their carefully created product development definition disrupted by the events that were caused by the pandemic. However, things are slowly starting to get better even as the pandemic is still with us.
Product managers who work in the fast food business are among the ones who seem to be getting back on their feet the fastest.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
The arrival of the Covid-19 pandemic has resulted in a lot of different changes that have swept through many industries.
Many have had to shut their doors and even more have lost customers as people have been forced to stay at home. However, out of all of this madness, there have been some companies that have actually been able to use the pandemic to prosper.
One such firm is in the business of connecting people who may live next door to each other.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
Let’s face it, everyone has been impacted by the arrival of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Even those stores that you would have thought could have made it through an upheaval like this seem to have been impacted. A good example of this is Starbucks. The Starbucks product managers, like everyone else, have had to close their stores for a while.
Now that they are once again able to reopen them, they need to revisit their product development definition and find new ways to generate money for the company in a world that has completely changed.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
I can only speak for myself, but if I was a product manager who was put in charge of a marijuana product, I would be very, very happy.
Think about it, what does every product manager want: we want our customers to want our product. When it comes to the product development definition for marijuana, there is no question that it is a very popular product. In fact, with the recent change in laws that has made marijuana legal for a number of different activities, more and more new products that have marijuana in them are being created and introduced. One of the biggest growth areas is drinks that have been infused with cannabis (marijuana).
There is only one problem that the product managers of these products will have to deal with: cannabis tastes really, really bad.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
I have a dog. I suspect that many of you have pets also.
I can only speak for myself, but I sure seem to spend a lot of money on food, leashes, toys, clothes, etc. for my dog. You would think with this need to keep buying things in order to take care of my pet, pet store product managers would have a very easy life. It turns out that you would be wrong.
So what’s going on here – why are pet store product managers struggling and do they need to change their product development definition?
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
So how do you feel about eating meat?
For that matter, how do you feel about eating meat alternatives that are made from plants? Plant-based meat product managers are racing to update their product development definition and fill in for missing cuts of traditional meat in supermarket meat cases, after the coronavirus disrupted operations at meatpacking plants.
How are product managers going to seize this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to make their products more successful?
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
Just in case you didn’t know it, Hermès is a company that makes ladies’ purses among other things.
Hermès is a French high fashion luxury goods manufacturer established in 1837. It specializes in leather, lifestyle accessories, home furnishings, perfumery, jewelry, watches and ready-to-wear. Just like every other business in the world, the arrival of the Covid-19 virus has affected Hermès. Their customers have had to stay home just like everyone else and have been unable to go out and shop for Hermès products.
How has this impacted Hermès?
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
Restaurant product managers are facing one of the toughest times that they have ever had to deal with. The arrival of the Covid-19 virus has changed everything for them.
Most restaurants have had to shut down for a while and customers have been told to stay at home and not go out. Many restaurants are reporting that their sales have fallen by up to 48% from a year ago. However, not everyone is suffering. In fact, business is booming for some restaurants.
What can product managers learn from the changes that are sweeping through the restaurant industry?
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
So when you walk into the space that you live in, what’s the first thing that you do?
For many of us, the first thing that we do is to shout out “Hey, Alexa turn on my music” or “Hey Google, turn on the lights in the kitchen.” These virtual assistants who are always there waiting for our next command to them have become a part of our lives. As powerful as they are, the product managers who make them understand a dirty little secret.
They’ve started to hit the wall in terms of what they can do for us.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
Let’s face it: that Starbucks coffee sure does taste good.
You know it, I know it, and all of those people who are currently standing in line waiting for their next cup of coffee know it also. Since it is so popular, it may come as somewhat of a surprise to you to learn that Starbucks is currently dealing with slowing foot traffic in their stores – not as many people are visiting them these days. At the same time, a lot of other companies have realized that people are willing to pay a lot of money for good coffee and so competition in the coffee shop business has shot up.
The product managers at Starbucks are going to have to get creative and make changes to their product development definition if they want to keep their profits up.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
If you are a product manager and you really want to make your life complicated, then what you should do is decide to develop a health care product.
This is going to make your life complicated in a bunch of different ways. First off, any product that you create is going to have to be approved by federal regulators before people can use it to solve health care issues. Next, you’re going to have to find a way for people’s health care insurance to pay for it. Somewhat amazingly, there are still some product managers who choose to work in this market.
These product managers now think that changing their product development definition and adding artificial intelligence (AI) to their products just might be what they need to do.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
Just imagine if you were a product manager for a jewelry store.
Your business would rely on people passing by, being drawn in by something that you had in the window, talking with a sales person, trying jewelry on, and then, with a little luck, buying something. Then the Covid-19 virus strikes and all of your customers start to stay at home – nobody is walking by any more.
What’s a product manager to do?
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
Let’s face it: the Covid-19 virus has changed just about everything in our lives.
Product managers for liquor have seen a dramatic change in their lives as bars and restaurants have had to close down. Customers who might have drunk their products at home have all been quarantined.
As you can well imagine, this has been a big setback and the plans that these product managers might have had for the rest of the year have had to be shelved and new plans are quickly being put together.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
With the arrival of Covid-19, the world of restaurants has been turned upside down.
Restaurant product managers are scrambling to change their product development definition and find ways to keep the doors (virtually) open even as their customers are being urged to stay home. The good news, if indeed there is any, is that customers still like the food that restaurants serve and they would like to eat it. In our modern society with services such as Uber Eats, DoorDash, and Grub Hub home bound customers can simply order restaurant food online and have it delivered to them.
However, this is starting to cause some problems for the restaurants themselves.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
Can you think of any job that would be more delicious than being a product manager for a pizza chain?
The product managers at the Papa John’s pizza company probably thought that they had the best job in the world for a very long time. Then things started to change for them. It seems as though almost overnight what had been a pretty easy product manager job suddenly became very difficult.
What do the Papa John’s product managers need to do to change their product development definition and turn things around for the company?
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
Ok, so there really is no pride here: I’ve been fired.
Not only have I been fired, but it turns out that I’ve been fired a lot. Like a total of seven times. Now, in my own defense I’ve worked for 14 different companies, but seven is still a very big number. I must confess that I really don’t quite know why I’ve been fired so much. As my sister has told me, you know there is one thing in common about all of the jobs that you’ve been fired from – you! I’m a nice guy. I don’t drink, do drugs, I show up for work on time and work the whole day, I get along with people, etc. And yet I still seem to keep getting fired. The good news for you from the flaming car wreck that is my career is that I’ve learned a lot about how to avoid getting fired (don’t do what I did).
Let’s talk about what you need to do as product manager in order to hold on to your job.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
So I really enjoy driving my car.
I get in, fire it up, hear the rumble of that motor (ok, so it’s a 4-cylinder motor – it’s not that much of a rumble), I pull out into the street, press the gas petal to the floor, and I’m off! Well, it turns out that over in China, they love their cars too. However, electric cars are currently all the rage and it turns out that the best-selling electric cars are not what you might think that they would be. In my country, the U.S., the best-selling electric cars are the wonders of modern technology created by Tesla – big cars that have every convenience that you could possibly think of. In China, it’s almost the opposite. The best-selling electric cars have a unique product development definition and are tiny and come with almost nothing.
What are these Chinese product managers up to?
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
As product managers, it is our responsibility to use our product development definition to create products that our customers will want.
With a little luck, they’ll discover our products, decide to buy them, and then place an order. You might think that a product manager’s job would be over at this point in time. However, the good folks at Amazon have succeeded in making our lives just a little bit more difficult. The Amazon Prime program provides Amazon customers with free two-day shipping for anything that they order from Amazon. What this means is the product managers are starting to discover that their customers have been programmed to expect to be able to receive anything that they order within two days.
Are you ready to deliver on this expectation?
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
Could there be any better job than being a product manager at a pizza company?
I mean, you have the ability to fully understand your product (and eat it to!), you know who your competition is, and your customers clearly want and desire your product. What more could a product manager ask for? Oh, perhaps more market share? Pizza companies have been locked in a battle for market share since the market was invented.
As the future starts to arrive, they are now looking at a game changer that could change their product development definition if they can get it correct, this just might give them the advantage that they have been looking for: driverless cars.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
As product managers, the one thing that I believe that most of us feel that we have a pretty good handle on is how new products are created and introduced.
I mean, we’ve worked at companies where this was probably part of our job and so we’ve had to sit through all of the planning meetings, review designs, work with sales, and find ways to get the product actually manufactured.
However, in our constantly changing world, things are once again changing and how new products get introduced is being replaced with microbrands.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
So I’m not sure if you are aware of it, but it turns out that all of the people in the world can be divided into one of two different groups.
These groups consist of people who like to get their morning coffee from Dunkin and people who like to get their morning coffee from Starbucks. Traditionally once you’ve picked which group you want to belong to, you will never change your mind.
The product managers at Dunkin have decided that they want to grow their market and so they are preparing to change their product development definition and do battle with the Starbucks product managers in order to see if they can win some more customers over to their way of doing coffee.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
So before we dive into my tale of woe, let’s first make sure that we are all on the same page at least in terms of vocabulary.
When you lose a job, there are a couple of different ways to have this happen. One is that you get laid off. This generally happens when the company is forced to reduce its workforce because they’ve run into financial problems or a contract got canceled or they are closing a branch office. Multiple people generally get laid off at the same time. You get the point. When you get fired, it’s a lot more personal. Everyone else is still going to have their job but you are not. You have been told that you are no longer wanted and you need to pack your things up and get out.
This is what happened to me. I got fired.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
So where do you live today?
The answer for a lot of us is in an apartment. Now let’s go back and think about what it took to get you into that apartment. First, of course, you had to find the apartment. Then you had to find a way to get the stuff that you owned to the apartment. Then it had to be put into the apartment. Finally, you spent the next weeks, months, years unpacking and putting everything in the place where it belonged. Wow – what an effort that was!
If only there was an easier way to go about this moving into an apartment thing…
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
We should all have such problems.
The product managers over at that very, very successful company called Amazon are now facing a new challenge. A while back Amazon paid US$13.5B to purchase the high-end grocery store chain called Whole Foods. The Amazon product managers are now under the gun to change their product development definition and apply what they have been able to do so well for selling books and home goods to food.
Just exactly how should they go about doing this?
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
How about a quick show of hands: who uses Microsoft Office every day?
Hmm, I believe that I see just about everyone’s hands in the air. Let’s face it, outside of the Microsoft Windows operating system, Microsoft Office is just about the most popular piece of software out there. Sure, there are some competitors such as Google Office and Libra Office; however, the biggest share of the market is owned by Microsoft and has been for roughly the past 30 years or so.
So why are the Microsoft product managers so slow to make improvements to Microsoft Office?
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
Just imagine if you were a product manager for Target stores.
You would be responsible for the success of a brand that has over 1,800 stores sprinkled throughout suburban areas everywhere. However, you would have recently bumped into some problems. Sales at your stores have just taken a dip for the first time in a couple of years. It’s starting to look like you need to take some steps to change things up and get more people to come to your stores if you want your product manager resume to keep looking good.
What are you going to have to do as a product manager to get things back on track?
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
We all know the company General Electric – at one point in time, they seemed to make just about everything that you could buy that could be plugged in.
These days GE is playing a game of catch up with other companies. GE wants to be a player in the growing business of large-scale electricity storage. The problem that their product managers are facing is that other companies such as Tesla and Siemens already have a strong position in this new business
Looks like they are going to have to update their product development definition and come up with a new product if they want to be competitive.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
So let’s picture a typical evening for you.
You get home from work, sort through the mail, change clothes, click on the TV, and then you start to think about dinner. Assuming that you have not gone crazy and called up Uber Eats to deliver you some restaurant food, you are going to be on the hook to create a meal for yourself. If you have some chef skills this won’t be all that hard to do; however, if you are like the rest of us you are going to be searching around for something to eat. One handy solution that a lot of us often go to is the so called “TV Dinner” – a frozen meal that has all of the important parts of a dinner such as vegetables, meat, and a desert.
Is this a meal that product managers could once again make popular?
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
Being a product manager for a high-end jewelry company would be a pretty good job to have.
You really would not have to sell all that much of your product in order to have a good year. However, these product managers have started to run into a problem. It turns out that the next generation of jewelry buyers, the millennials, just don’t seem to be into the pretty, sparkly, things that you wear every once-in-a-while. These are the things that their parents and grandparents used to buy.
What’s a product manager to do?
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
Just imagine if you were a product manager at one of the big technology firms out there (Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Oracle, etc.).
You would always be under pressure to change your product development definition and come up with new and different ways for the company to make money. You’d probably look at all of the different markets that your company’s resources could be applied to looking for one where you could generate the most money. In the end, you’d probably always come back to the world of finance – that’s where your company’s big computers could do a lot of good.
However, what would you do if your biggest customers were already there?
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
Ah, to be a product manager at Coke-Cola.
Would that not be the best job ever? Coke is a huge company, it has a very large market share, and every customer that you might ever want to capture has already heard about about your product. What more could a product manager ask for? Coke has been focused on creating sugary drinks even as the rest of the world started to shift its drinking habits to water and healthier options. Coke’s sales were starting to stall and this called for a change in their product development definition.
What could their product managers do to turn things around?
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
When it comes time to ship a product to a customer, product managers in the U.S. know that they have three different options: the Postal Service, FedEx, and UPS.
FedEx and UPS generally cost more, but they are fiercely competitive and if you hand your package off to them, you know that it will reach where it is supposed to go.
However, it turns out that UPS has been running into some problems and their product managers are going to have to get creative to solve them.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
There are exciting product manager jobs and then there are the product manager jobs at the really big food companies.
Yes, yes – the good news is that you’ll probably be a relatively successful product manager no matter what you do simply because the big food companies provide us with the products that we all know and love. However, because of the sameness of the job, there is a good chance that this will not be the most exciting product manager job out there.
However, lately things have been changing and this job is starting to become a lot more cutting edge…
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
Sigh. As product managers we all would like to think of ourselves as being the person who is in charge of a cool product like Facebook or the iPhone.
However, the world is filled with other products that need the help of product managers and so who’s to say what product we will eventually be put in charge of? One product that perhaps none of us would look forward to managing would be adult diapers. I mean, nobody really wants to buy this product, right?
What’s the best way for a product manager to deal with a product that people need, but don’t want?
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
As product managers, we all spend our time trying to better understand what our customers really want.
This can be a tricky thing to do. We need to understand what motivates our customers in order to better understand how we can provide them with the products that they will be willing to buy. Product managers at some of the largest companies out there, Amazon, Walmart, and Target, have decided that being able to deliver products that customers have ordered the next day is the best way to attract more customers.
Just exactly how are they going to go about doing this?
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
Imagine for a moment that you were a product manager working at Starbucks.
The company is growing, everyone likes your product, you would be on top of the world. In fact, Starbucks has opened over 2,000 cafes in the U.S. over the past three years. The result of this rapid growth has been that you can find a Starbucks just about anywhere. However, the downside to all of this growth is that their traffic growth is starting to slow.
What is a Starbucks product manager to do?
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
Quick quiz: where have you been eating your meals lately?
Perhaps a better version of this question would be: how many times have you eaten at home lately? If you are like most of us, your answer is going to be mixed. Yeah, you might grab a breakfast at home, but do you take your lunch to work? How about dinner – do you eat at home or go out?
Since you are not eating at home as much as you should, you are starting to cause problems for packaged food product managers.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
So here’s a quick question for you: what’s the most important meal of the day?
If you said breakfast, then the product managers at Wendy’s would agree with you. Wendy’s has decided to once again make an attempt to expand their product development definition and start to offer breakfast items in an effort to attract more customers to their stores in the morning.
The market for breakfast foods is a crowded market and the Wendy’s product managers may be up against some stiff competition: how can they be successful?
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
When you travel and you need transportation at the other end of your trip, what do you do?
If you are like most of us, when you are buying your airplane ticket and making your hotel reservation you go ahead and call up an established rental car company and make a reservation. When you fly into the airport, you take the car rental bus to the car rental lot, pick up your car and you drive away. That’s all fine, but that is so old school.
It turns our that there is a new way to get around and it’s changing the rental car product development definition and causing headaches for established rental car company product managers.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
The Amazon product managers have a real problem on their hands.
They are in charge of one of the more popular brands in the world and the creation of their Amazon Prime service has only made the company even more popular. However, as we are all aware of, what you did for me yesterday is nice, but what I’m really interested in is what you will be doing for me tomorrow. The Amazon product managers are under a lot of pressure to continue to update their product development definition and keep growing the brand.
One part of the world where Amazon would like to become bigger is Britain. What the product managers need is a way to hook more customers.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
The product managers at Amazon have a big problem on their hands.
The company, which is already huge, wants to keep on growing. What this means for the product managers is that they always have to be looking for new businesses that Amazon can expand into.
They think that they may have come up with one that could, over time, make a substantial contribution to the company’s bottom line: a new line of grocery stores.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
Retail giants Amazon and Walmart really, really want to start selling a great deal in India.
In fact, they are willing to spend billions to set up shop there. However, their success is not guaranteed. It turns out that they are going to be battling the countless number of mom-and-pop stores that are already there and these stores are not going away any time soon.
How is this battle going to sort itself out?
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
In the world of shopping in bulk, you have choices.
Specifically, when you need a huge amount of toilet paper or paper towels, you can choose to go to either Sam’s Club or Costco. Where do you choose to go? If you are like most people, if you have a choice you generally choose go to Costco. It’s not clear why we make this choice. I suspect that one of the reasons is because Sam’s Club is so closely tied to Walmart that most of us really don’t want to go there. You would think that the Sam’s Club product managers would have a real challenge on their hands when they went to China.
However, it turns out that was not a problem.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
Let’s face it: Amazon is a very big company and they have done a lot of different things very well.
However, it turns out that they may not yet be able to do everything perfectly. One area where the Amazon product managers are still struggling is in Europe. Specifically, when it comes to selling both apparel and footwear they have not yet quite figured out what Europeans really want.
What can the Amazon product managers do to fix this problem?
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
If you lived in a modern city, how would you chose to get around town?
Yes, you could always walk – however, that’s going to take a lot of time and you are going to be tired when you get where you are going. There are cabs / Uber / Lyft and these all work, but they can quickly become quite expensive. Most cities have buses and subways, but how far away from you is the closest stop and how close is it going to get you to where you want to go?
In these modern times in which we are living, it turns out that you may have another option – ride a bike.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
Clearly product managers at the Starbucks coffee chain have no problems getting customers to drop by their stores in the morning and purchase coffee.
However, as is the case with product managers everywhere, the Starbucks product managers are under pressure to keep growing the firm’s profits.
If they are going to do this, then they need to come up with a way to get their morning customers to come back to the stores later in the day and buy more coffee.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
When you go shopping, what do you get?
If you are like most of us you probably pick up some eggs, some cheese, some vegetables, and, oh yeah, some milk. However, what type of milk do you get? For a very long time our choices have been somewhat limited. We always got the same types: whole, 2%, or skim. However, some creative product managers are getting ready to change the product development definition of milk and the existing milk product managers are going to have be be ready to deal with it.
What’s going on here?
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
As product managers, when we want to boost the sales of our product, one of the “levers” that we have to make this happen is the price of our product.
If everything works out the way that it should, if we lower the price of our product then sales should go up. However, product managers who work for traditional retailers are discovering that for them their product development definition has changed and this lever is not working the way that it should. There are a lot of reasons for this, but the fact that their customers are starting to use more technology when they shop is part of the issue.
What can be done to put control of a product’s success back in the hands of product managers?
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
So here’s an interesting question to kick things off: do you wear a watch?
Not all that long ago, the answer to this question would have been pretty much “yes” for everyone. I mean, how else were you going to be able to tell what time it was? However, as with all such things in life, things have changed. Now when people want to know what time it is, they whip out their mobile phones and glance at them. Kids these days just don’t think about purchasing the fancy watches that their parents used to buy.
What can watch product managers do to change things?
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
I suspect that if I asked you to take a moment and feel sorry for the product managers who work for Amazon, you probably would not.
For that matter, if I asked you to take a moment and feel bad for the product managers who work for Amazon, you probably would also find that hard to do. However, it turns out that being one of these types of product managers is quite difficult. The reason that it is so hard is because although your company is already very large, you are still under a great deal of pressure to keep growing your product lines.
What’s a product manager to do?
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
Crate and Barrel sells a lot of furniture.
They are now faced with the age old question of how best to get their furniture noticed by their potential customers. In the past, the firm relied on what had always worked for them: still photographs. However, lately that has all changed. The company now has over a million Instagram followers. They also now produce more digital content then they produce photographs. New videos are published on YouTube weekly.
What changed at Crate and Barrel?
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
I can’t actually tell you if it would be one of the best product management jobs to have, but I can tell you that it would certainly be one of the most delicious.
What am I talking about? I’m talking about being a product manager who works for YUM Brands. You know, the company that owns the Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, and KFC brands. It turns out that the world of fast food that these folks live in is undergoing a great deal of change and that means that these product managers have to scramble to change their product development definition and keep up.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
As I’m sure that we all know by now, Amazon is a very large company that does a lot of different things: they ship books and products, offer cloud computing resources, and even run an internet based television channel.
The product managers at Amazon are under an enormous amount of pressure to always be looking for ways for the company to keep on growing. This is why they have expanded in to such diverse areas as grocery stores. However, now the Amazon product managers are taking a closer look at how they run their business and they’ve decided that it’s time for some of the firms that they have been relying on to go away.
Now Amazon is getting ready to update their product development definition in order to take on UPS and start its own delivery business.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
So for just a moment, picture yourself as a product manager for one of the most iconic products out there: Coke-Cola.
You’ve done a great job – Coke is one of the most popular drinks available and no matter what country you go to, it is very well known. The company makes an enormous amount of money from your soft drink product every year and in all honesty, traditionally you’ve only had one real competitor – Pepsi. However, in the past few years, things have started to become a bit more challenging for you. More and more of your customers are staring to reject the sugary beverage that you are offering them and instead they are choosing to drink water and sports drinks.
What’s a product manager to do?
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
So who among us has not heard about the famous TV show “American Idol”?
This is the show where anyone can try out to be on the show and the best singers are then selected to compete in a multi-week competition in which one of them will eventually be crowned the “American Idol” and potentially get a lucrative recording contract. This show used to be very popular, then it fell out of popularity and eventually ended up getting canceled. However, now another network is thinking about bringing it back.
Can their product managers change its product development definition and bring a once popular TV show back from the dead?
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
Amazon is a large and powerful company that dominates the world of online selling. Walmart is a large and powerful company that dominates the world of bricks & mortar selling.
These two firms are starting to come into conflict when it comes to next-day home delivery as Walmart starts to move into online sales and Amazon starts to move into home delivery.
The product managers at Amazon are going to have to sharpen their skills and review their product development definition in order to go into battle with the product managers at Walmart.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
Every product manager job is different. Some are easy and some are hard. Right now, being the product manager at Boeing who is responsible for the 737 MAX jet would defiantly fall into the difficult category.
The reason that this would be such a hard job to have right now is because this airplane has experienced a set of disastrous crashes. In October, Lion Air Flight 610 crashed just minutes after taking off from Jakarta, Indonesia. It was the first fatal accident involving a 737 Max. 189 people died. This was followed in March when Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302, involving the same Max jet model, also crashed minutes after takeoff, killing all 157 people on board.
How can product manager come back from product setbacks like this?
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
So if you were a product manager who was in charge of an automobile, what do you think that your #1 concern would be? Do you think that your customers would care most about how fast your car could go? How about how many doors it has or the size of its tires? Could it be the sound system or the built-in navigation system?
What’s very interesting is that although all of these items may be important to your car buying customer, they may not be the one thing that will cause them to buy or not buy your car. What could that one thing be you ask?
How about cupholders?
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
So if you are running a business and you’d like to keep your customers aware and informed about what products you are offering, what’s the best way to go about doing this?
In our modern age, a lot of product managers would look at their product development definition and say that you need to update your web site and they’d be correct.
However, what more and more store owners are discovering is that one of the oldest retailing tricks has somehow survived the arrival of the e-commerce wave – the paper circular.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
Quick question for you: when was the last time that you were in a Barnes & Noble bookstore?
When I tried to answer this question, I had to think about it for awhile. I think that the last time I actually entered one of their stores was around Christmas when I had whittled my list down to the last few people who are always hard to shop for. Since then, I haven’t been back. The Barnes & Noble product managers know that I have not been back – that’s a problem for them.
Clearly they need to make some changes in order to get people like me to both visit their stores more often and, of course, buy more stuff!
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
So if I was to take a look inside of your purse or wallet right now, what would I find? I’m willing to bet that you probably have either a Visa or a Mastercard credit card, perhaps an American Express credit card or even a Discover credit card. However, what else would be there?
Would you have any store issued credit cards? Perhaps from Walmart, Macy’s, Home Depot, etc.?
Well guess what, these store issued credit cards are in trouble and their product managers are scrambling to find ways to change their product development definition in order to save them.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
Shaving is something that men without beards or mustaches do just about every day.
In all honesty, I don’t think that we spend a lot of time thinking about shaving – it’ just something that we do.
Over at Gillette, since they make razors, they spend a lot of time thinking about how men shave and they have reached a startling conclusion: their products cost too much!
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
Let’s face it: if you are a product manager for the traditional car engine, called an internal combustion engine, things are looking rather tough for you right now.
The world is changing and you’ve suddenly got a lot of completion. The arrival of popular electric vehicles and a bunch of new government regulations about pollution mean that internal combustion engines are now at risk and their product development definition is going to have to be changed.
The good news for product managers is that the auto makers and oil companies are coming together to find ways to save this type of engine. The secret appears to be a new high-tech engine oil.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
So let’s talk about email for just a moment. If you are like me, you get a ton of the stuff. In all honesty, most of it is junk and I just end up deleting it even before I read it.
However, there are those one or two emails that just happen to catch my eye. I’m in the market for something and that email seems to be talking about what I know that I’m looking for. When this happens, and it doesn’t happen very often, I will open and, gasp!, read the email.
It turns out that retail product managers are currently not doing a very good job of getting me to open the emails that they send me. What’s up?
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
When was the last time that you went out to a mall?
For most of us, it’s probably been a while. We used to always go to the mall – that’s where you could get stuff, especially during the holidays. However, with the arrival of online shopping most of us don’t go to malls as much anymore. This has created a problem for mall product managers.
Creating and filling a mall with stores used to be a straightforward job for product managers: get a few big stores, get some smaller but still well known stores, and ta-da you had a mall.
However, with today’s changing retail situation, mall product managers are having to change their product development definition and how they do their job.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
Product managers for grocery stores have actually had it pretty easy for quite some time. If you think about it, your local grocery store probably has not changed all that much since you were a little kid. Oh sure, now they have organic vegetables and perhaps they create prepared meals, but their product development definition has not really changed all that much.
It turns out that big changes are getting ready to come. With the arrival of “shop from home services”, grocery stores are going to have to change in order to stay in business.
It sure seems like their product managers are going to have to start to get innovative.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
How many of you have ever been involved in a water balloon fight? I’m willing to bet that most of us have at some point in time.
Do you remember how that went? You got some balloons, then it seemed to take forever as you used the hose to fill the balloons, and then you proceeded to run around your yard throwing your balloons at your friends trying to get them as wet as you possibly could. I think that we can all agree that the biggest delay in our fun was the annoying time that it took to fill up all of those water balloons.
Well good news, that problem has been solved. However, soon after it was solved someone else came along with the same solution.
What’s a product manager to do?
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
So here’s a quick question for you: what is the shortest time that you’ve ever worked at a product manager job?
Product managers are generally considered to be valuable members of the product team who work on the product development definition and we can have a direct impact on the bottom line of the product project that we are involved in. We’re valuable and generally a company would be resistant to getting rid of us as long as our product is doing well.
That’s why I was surprised when I got fired after two weeks on the job at my new product manager position.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
As product managers, the one thing that we’d all like to have is more customers. We dream of the day that we’ve created a product development definition that will cause our customers think about our product and then as quickly as they can take action to get their hands on it.
These hopes and dreams are no different for product managers who work in the restaurant industry. These product managers have the same set of things that they want. A little while back they thought that they had found a way to make it happen: create mobile applications to support their restaurant!
Well, good idea, but it came with some side effects that nobody had counted on…
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
Let’s be straight about a few things: the world in which we live is currently changing. A lot. Nowhere is this more evident than perhaps when we take a look at how consumers go about buying food.
This used to be a simple task: people jumped into their cars with their food shopping list in hand and drove to the local grocery store and got what they needed. However, with the arrival of that internet thing, this is all starting to change.
People are now starting to shop for food online. What this has meant for food company product managers is that their world is changing. Case in point. People who are shopping online tend to just buy exactly what is on their shopping list. Nothing else.
This means that product managers have to come up with ways to change their product development definition so that they can convince them to add last minute items that they may not have been planning on buying. How are they going to do that?
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
So let’s see a show of hands. Who here enjoys a delicious, juicy, burger? Hmm, I don’t see everyone’s hands going up, but I do see just about everyone’s hands going up. There is no question that in the developed 1st world countries, people do love their meat.
There’s just one problem – it turns out that it’s really expensive in terms of land, water, and feed to raise the animals that produce all of that meat. As the rest of the world starts to develop a taste for protein, we’re just not going to be able to keep doing things the way that we’re doing them today.
Looks like its time for the product managers to step in and lend a helping hand by changing their protein product development definition.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
Every product needs a product manager. This means that things that are good for us (think vegetables, running shoes, and protein bars) all need product managers. Likewise, things that are legal but perhaps not so good for us also need to have their own product managers (think guns, fatty foods, and porn). Into this latter category falls cigarettes.
There is no doubt that cigarettes are a big business or that they are bad for the customers who choose to use them. They are legal, but they are also generally considered to be deadly for those who choose to smoke. This is the way that the world has been for quite some time. Until things changed.
All of sudden, cigarette product managers found themselves in the challenging position of having to find ways to get their customers to not smoke.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support
Just imagine if you were a product manager at Amazon. What would one of your biggest challenges be? There’s no problem with Amazon having what your customers want – Amazon is huge and they’ve got a lot of warehouses. No, your biggest problem would be just exactly how you were planning on getting what your customer has ordered from your warehouse into their hands. Like a million times a day. Good news. Amazon thinks that they may have found a solution to this problem: hub.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jim-anderson3/support