Out Innovating the Competition w/ Jessica Hall, VP of Product Strategy and Design at 3Pillar Global

Hey there, this is Mike Belcedo with Product Collective, and we're back for another product launch session. Uh, thank you for being here. We went on a little bit of a break during Industry, the product conference, which is the conference that we organize and have each fall. And for those of you that were at Industry, thank you for being there. Um, for those of you that weren't there, maybe we'll get you next time. It was pretty awesome. We had 700 people from, I think it was 37 states and 13 countries this year. So really, people came from all over. Jason Fried, Bob Mesta, Megan Quinn, there's some awesome speakers there. And actually, my guest today wasn't there but had a lot of team members there from 3Pillar Global. And really, I'd love to, I want to jump into the session pretty soon, but for those of you that are here for the very first time, thanks for joining us. And just a couple sort of instructions or ground rules, if you will, not really rules, no rules here at Product Launch. We're gonna have this chat with Jessica, and throughout, if you have questions, whether it's about what we're talking about right at that minute or any other kind of questions, feel free to ask them in the Ask a Question section. There is a chat on the side, and you're welcome to use that chat, introduce yourself for sure. In fact, if you can see and hear me okay, maybe just mention that in the chat so I could feel some confirmation there. But ask questions that you want me to ask Jessica in the Ask a Question section, and I'll keep monitoring that throughout. So with that, I want to jump right into the session today. And Jessica, you're with Three Pillar Global. Thank you so much for being here.

Thank you for having me.

Absolutely. I know that we're going to talk about out-innovating the competition, but before we even dive into that, would you mind just kind of giving just a very brief background about you and the kind of work that Three Pillar Global does too?

Sure. So Three Pillar Global is a product development service company. We have more than 50 clients and more than 70 teams that are helping clients from startups to enterprise build new products and bring them to market so that they can grow their business. And we have engineers, QA engineers, architects, business analysts, UX designers, product managers. And my team, the team that I lead, is made up of all the product and UX people in the company. So what's really great for anyone listening is that I get to see how people do product at all sorts of different companies who are dealing with all sorts of problems. So I think it gives me an opportunity to share a lot of different ideas to people that they could use whatever their situation is.

That's awesome. Well, I know we're set to talk about innovation and our competition and how much we should pay attention to them. And this is definitely a topic for me that I was excited to cover because I mean, I remember particularly in two product roles that I had, competition was something that came up so much within our office, within our teams, and it was always such a struggle. It's like, well, should we be just keeping our customers in mind and we build for our customers and that's what we stay focused on? But, you know, then when you see a competitor launching some new groundbreaking product, we're like, should that have been on our roadmap? You know, should we have been thinking about that? So, um, I, you know, definitely wanted to talk through through this with you. And I'm just curious, maybe to start things off, how much should we be thinking about our competition when, you know, when we're thinking about the products that we build, the customers that we serve? How much of a factor should competition play in our minds?

So we have everyone in our company, and we're almost 1,000 now, is taught something called product mindset. It's how we think about how products should be built and brought to market. And one of those values is called build for outcomes. The idea that we're not here just to write code. but we're there to help grow that business. And if we're going to do that right, we have to serve the customers that we have, the customers that we want. We also have to serve the business. So we should be focusing on our customers. What are their problems? What are their needs? How are they using the software? But if we want to do right by the business, we need to have a sense of what's going out in the marketplace. How are we different? How are we going to differentiate ourselves? How are we going to position ourselves? Because we only have so many sales and marketing dollars. That we're gonna bring to the, that are available at any given time. So there has to be this balancing of those two things. And I think what people get wrong in competition is I think they look at competition in a very narrow lens. So for example, a bunch of our clients are in the fitness space. And so if you're a gym owner, your competition just isn't other gyms. It's yoga studios, boot camps, CrossFit studios, streaming services, YouTube videos, And the other competitor is always complacency. So I think a lot of times when we, we look at competition, we look at it too narrowly, just that other player that's very much like us without seeing there's actually a universe of things out there that could be affecting our product. And we need to think about who we are, how we serve, what makes us special in amongst those other things.

Yeah, well, so let me ask you this, how Knowing that product people, like, we want to be seen as staying ahead of the curve. We want, especially if whether it's our management teams or our customers, you know, when they're comparing us to whether it's competitors or like you said, just other kind of competitive alternatives, we want them to view us as being, you know, more innovative and more, I guess, problem-solving than those other solutions as well. Are there, I guess, how do we do that? Like, what's the best way for us to ensure that we are always staying ahead of the curve?

Sure, I think that's really hard because there is a personal, a bit of cost there. You do wanna be market-leading. You do want, if there's buzz in your industry, you want it to be that you and your team and your scene is doing the awesome things. And when someone else gets that spotlight, that's pretty tough. And a lot of times when that spotlight, when that pressure is being put on, it's being put on by your sales and marketing. At least in most of the clients, where they, they're saying, well, so-and-so's got this feature and this feature, and then they're comparing features. So there's a couple of things that we had to deal with there. One is we need a way of evaluating the things that our competitors are doing, making the decision as to whether we should pursue them or not. And then we also need a way of kind of helping our marketing team be able to communicate why we're doing what we're doing, why that's valuable, and not necessarily getting us stuck into a feature race. That we're never going to win. And that's going to create a lot of features that no one else has used, and the cost of carry of all that development just trying to keep up is really hard, and it's going to make you— make it difficult for you to innovate later because you have all this crap that you have to deal with that no one's actually using. So we have to do both of those things. If we're going to do number 1, which is to try and make some decisions about what our customers are doing, I would point you to the Kano model. I don't know if you've ever heard of that. It was created by a Japanese economist, and it identifies 3 types of needs or features. There are basic needs. These are things that you just, you know, would expect they were there, and if they weren't, you'd be like, you've got to be kidding me. So for example, if you show up in a hotel room and there are no clean towels, you think, you've got to be kidding me. How is it possible that any functioning hotel anywhere would not have clean towels in them. And when— if someone was doing user research trying to understand what's important about the hotel experience, they probably wouldn't think to ask you about towels, and you probably wouldn't necessarily think to say, well, I need a towel in my room or something, because it's latent. You just expect it to happen. Table stakes kind of feature. But if there are 30 towels in your room, it's not going to make you happier, because you probably only need— I mean, I'm only ever in hotel rooms for a night, then I'm off to the next So, you know, having these things extra is fun. So is this a basic need? Do we have to have this just to be on the playing field with other people? The next category need, which is a little bit higher, is a performance need. These are things that people are actively thinking about when they're making a buying choice. So things like energy efficiency, speed, power, being able to do single cycle. These are things that people know that they're mad— and the more you invest in delivering those features, you get an incremental increase in customer satisfaction. So these things that are— stand out that they think about. And so performance needs are something to consider, but those performance needs are going to be different based on who that person is. There are a lot of people in the DC area where I'm from where traffic is just horrendous and you spend a lot of time in your car. So energy efficiency might matter to you. If you're in a place where you, you know, gas is cheap and you don't have far to drive, that may not be as important. So those performance integrators, things that you're gonna have to make some trade-offs. Do we want to keep up with this? Do we not? Do we continue to invest in those things and see that incremental improvement, or does that not make sense? And then there's the third category here, which is called the delighter. It's something that's surprising. It's something that maybe didn't cost a lot of money or didn't take a lot to invent, but you put it in and people are just like, "What?" When Netflix first remembered where you were in a show, what show you were watching, where you were in that show, that was probably a wow moment. 'Cause you're used to having to go through and find all those things. And now we, of course, we would be like, "Of course you have to have that." Now it's table stakes, probably. Now it's table stakes. So what happens is you go from a delighter to performance to a basic need. Things degrade down. And so those things that came out, they're like, oh my God, it's amazing. It's the best thing ever, will degrade quickly. And then, so, you know, the first time that Gmail said, you know, you mentioned the attachment, but you didn't actually attach anything. These are the kind of little things that create that delight, which are going to degrade. And they're going to put delighters to performance need. And all of a sudden, the idea that you would have any streaming service that wouldn't be able to remind you where you were in the stream? That probably doesn't happen very often. So that gives you a model to say, is this table stakes? Do we absolutely have this? Is this something that is a performance need where we can make a decision as to whether or not we're going to do it, or is it a delighter that is so going to drive new business that we have to think about either matching that, bringing it down to the performance side, or striving for a different delay. So it gives you a way to think through these in a structured way. And I like that.

Yeah, no, and at least it's a framework that you could use to work through. I, you know, one, one thing that kind of comes to mind for me is, you know, I could remember back to when I was that product person and, you know, I was, you know, I could think through that. Like, if you had mentioned that framework for me, that would make a lot of sense to me, and I could try to work through that. But then I still might have our CEO coming to me saying, yeah, but, you know, they just launched this product. Do you have any recommendations for, you know, people to kind of— whether you're using that sort of framework or not, but how do you sell that up? Is it, you know, trying to open up that process to the executive, or what recommendations might you have?

That's going to depend a lot on the size and scale of an organization and how much you have to structure that argument. And it's not uncommon. A lot of my clients are saying, oh man, CEO saw this thing, they think it's the coolest thing ever. So the important thing to do is take a moment and say, okay, this is what it is. Let's say, let's take a look at it and break it down and say, okay, here's what this feature does. Here's who it serves. Here's how it helps them. Here's what makes it look different than what we have today. And then here is what we can do about it. What, what are the kind of costs and trade-offs associated. And as long as the executives have those things laid out, you can usually walk them down the path. And the trick is to help them understand what other things they're giving up. Like, what— there were other things that, you know, the sales team has been yelling at for months, and you go chase this and you're not going to be able to do that. So being able to break it down and say to a CEO, I understand you're interested in this. Here's the potential benefits that we have. Here's the downside. Here's how that fits in with everything that we've already planned. And I'm going to have to take one of these things out or push it down in order to make room for that. So let's have a conversation about that. And if we have that conversation, we're solving problems together and we're not necessarily telling the CEO, no, sorry, can't have it, not on the roadmap. We're probably going to fight about roadmaps later, by the way. But part of it is, especially when you're talking to an executive, Starting with no, it's not a good idea. At least I can tell you as a consultant. But let's walk them through the process. Let's give them a decision-making process. And we may realize that as we look at this is really a delighter, this is a game changer, you know, these other things that are rolled out, maybe they're not important anymore. Maybe we should change them. Maybe that makes a lot of sense. But what doesn't make a lot of sense is just going all over the place just to respond, because that has that distracts and demoralizes the team, that introduces a lot of cost of carry and sales and support. That means that there may be things that were really important that people have been asking for that you're ignoring. And all of a sudden now that competition is much more attractive because you're not moving on the things that your customers said that were important to you. So having a framework to walk through those conversations is really important. That's what I teach all of my folks to do is have a game plan where you're walking them through the decision-making process and leading them to it rather than saying, oh, we can't do that. That's especially the further away you are from an executive, the harder it is to win if you're just going to say no. Right.

No, I, I'm glad you brought that up. I remember it was one of my favorite strategies and I would— I was always more on the early stage side. So, you know, companies that maybe had 50, 100 employees tops. Like, I've always been more in that startup level. And I, but I remember, you know, we'll have conversations like that pop up, and that's when I would break the roadmap out and say, okay, that's— it does sound neat and exciting. Let's look at the roadmap. So these are the things that are really important. Which of these are not important anymore? And it almost without fail, we would— I mean, there might be some times where we would together decide it is actually more important, but if you don't revert back to it, it's, it's a lot easier to just fall into the trap of, oh, let's just keep adding whatever the new flavor of the week is. So I, yeah, I like that you brought that up.

Yeah, I, I don't actually believe in scope creep. I don't think it's a thing in product development. That change is just a natural state of being in what we do. And there's always going to be changes in the market and the customers, what competition, all of these change. And so we can't just say, well, no, we're just not going to do that. What we need to do is have a way of on a regular basis looking at these things that come in, making decisions about them, and understanding how they impact other things. And that doesn't have to be something that requires a lot of time or a lot of effort or a lot of formal process around it. We just need something so that when that thing comes in, maybe it's awesome and we should do it. Maybe it's not awesome and we shouldn't, but we have a way of managing it that doesn't become a fight between the CEO and the team.

Yeah. By the way, somebody had asked the question, are you aware of any tools that can help people with the Kano model, whether it's analyzing results or what have you, or something that one works through individually, just sort of on their own? What do you suggest for that?

So there are surveys that you can run using the Kano methodology that you can deploy to your customers. It's based on like a Likert scale. And so you can easily find those online. I use it more as a framework. So we start to think about what these things are. But there are different tools that people put out in the marketplace using the Kano model. I use it a lot with the startups that I mentor, so that the tool budget is not so big. But if you're thinking about things, I would think about Kano surveys as being one of the tools in your tool belt. Thinking about, you know, analyzing some of your customer feedback, your customer research with that lens. Is something that you can do pretty easily and pretty low cost, which is what a lot of people are looking for. That's great.

That's helpful. So I want to ask you, you know, when I think about out-innovating the competition, and it's kind of, you know, the topic that we chose for this session, it almost has an inference that I, I know about my competition and, you know, their innovation methods. And maybe not the methods, but like how innovative they are, the new things that they're doing, and So it's almost like, you know, to out-innovate, you have to kind of know where the competition is. Is there a way to constantly have at least somewhat of a pulse on what your competitors are trying to do? You know, like how they're moving forward? Because it seems like if you wait for, you know, their breakthrough product to come out, it could be kind of too late at that point, or at least you're playing a lot of catch-up. So just curious if there's a way to sort of stay ahead there.

Yeah, I think there's a couple of different ways. One is, again, it comes back to that balance. We serve our customers first, but we also have to understand the market and understand what's happening in that market and making sure that when we're out there selling or marketing, that we are, we have something unique and valuable to say. And so there's a lot of sources of information. Your sales and marketing team is a good one because you assume that they're out in the They're out there, they're looking at these things. They're, you know, I guarantee you if a salesperson runs into anybody talking about the competition, they will be very vocal about that fact. You know, media monitoring is an option, or looking at their social media, talking with customers, going to events, product forums. So there's a lot of different ways to find out. And I think keeping a pulse is probably right. You want to know what they're doing. But you don't— if you can spend all their time focusing on what they're doing, you're not going to be focusing on what you need to be doing. And trying to also, I would say, keep your team focusing on what's immediately in our future. And this is something that you're kind of doing, that you're bringing to the team at the right time. I'd also say for a lot of our customers, there is a pretty prescribed sales and marketing cadence across the year. There are certain keystone events. Or certain times of the year where it's really important to be selling or really important to be onboarding new customers. So you have to also understand what does the sales and marketing cycle look like in your industry. And assuming that any competitors of yours would probably be aligned to that cycle or they have their own cycle. So you know that in September, they're probably, if they have something big, it's gonna come in September. And so you're kind of planning your year around You know, when are the big events where you want to be able to talk about something new? When are the big sales pushes? When are the times where people are most likely to buy? Or if it's a B2B company, 40% of renewals tend to happen in Q4. So it's really going to depend on your sales cycle, but I think understanding what that cadence looks like and then having data points to plug in along the way gives you a good hold on it, as you said, but doesn't allow you necessarily to get completely focused on them and not on yourself. To that end, when it comes to— we talked about the, you know, getting derailed earlier. It's really important that your sales and marketing team is equipped with knowing who we're serving, why we're serving them, and they're truly involved in that. Because otherwise it gets into a feature battle. You know, do they have 10 things? Do we have 10 things? We don't need 10 things. We probably need one thing. It's always the right thing. And so making sure that they are well-educated to talk about your product and the value that you create and the problems that you solve for your customer, because if their feature— if they're entirely dependent on a feature list to sell, that's gonna— that's a huge issue. And we're gonna have— you're gonna have to equip them with different ways of selling so that you're not always in the feature arms race.

Yeah, I like that. Well, and especially It's innovation. This isn't a one-person responsibility, right? It's not like, you know, you work in an organization and it's like, well, that's the— that person, they're the innovation person, you know. So we're innovative because that one person— it should be something that it's an organizational mindset. You mentioned the product mindset earlier. I'm just curious if there are methods or, you know, things that we can do as product people to kind of help empower the rest of the organization to, you know, make sure we're all on the same page and sort of all thinking about innovation, but also in the context of, you know, being collaborative and so we can have a leg up on our competition. You mentioned some good strategies already in terms of like, hey, your sales team, they're getting this information. Are there other proactive things that we can do as product people to help the rest of the company?

Yeah, actually, I love that you asked this question because this is a huge deal to me. And this is something I definitely spend a lot of time doing. So what we do at Three Pillars is that everyone in the company is trained in something called the product mindset, which has values, principles, and practices attached to it. It's kind of how we bring together our 11 years of being in business with also things like agile and lean startup and design thinking. We wanted to make it really simple and something that had to be able to cross 3 borders instantly. And work with people from the US and India and Romania. And so one of our principles is called Achieve Together. The idea that we are only going to win if everybody is in, if everybody understands the business context, if everybody's had exposure to the customer, if, if everybody is making all the decisions that are going to get made by a product team on a daily basis with those goals in sight, then we're going to be more effective as a unit. In fact, my CTO has a talk that he likes to give about why innovation labs suck. And it's because this idea— is this idea that when you make innovation one person's job or one department's job, then you're limiting the best ideas, you're limiting creativity, you're siloing creativity. What we need is everybody focus on the mountain that we're climbing together. And so we base a lot of our training, the things we do, about how do we get everybody on the same page. The danger when it comes to the competition is if our, um, technical lead, let's say, is really trying to think about the competition, not necessarily what we want them to be focusing on. They need to have a sense of what the competition is doing and where we're trying to go and why we're trying to go there so that they can make smart decisions about what they're doing. But we might want to, you know, say, I'm going to, you know, on every other week, we're going to get a leg here. We're going to talk about what the competition is doing. So, you know, you're up to speed. So maybe you come up with some ideas or ways of implementing things that's going to help. But we're not going to engage you. We're not expecting that you're looking at competitive intelligence all the time because that's not the best use of their time. But the idea that we're all going to have to drive there together is really important and kind of core to what we do. Even though we're working for clients and, you know, we have 70 different product teams doing all sorts of different things, they all have to operate with certain values and principles about how we do things and how things work.

Yeah, well, thank you for that. I think it's— that's what we're constantly thinking about. You know, we're trying to stay ahead of the curve anyway. So just feel like if we can help empower the rest of the organization, we'd all be in a better place. I love that. I do want, you know, kind of in the same vein, I'm just, and you kind of had mentioned a couple of these things already. I mean, even like, you know, going through Kano exercises, Kano modeling exercises, that could be one of them. I'm just curious, are there other sort of habits and best practices that, almost like things that we can do regularly to make sure that we're staying in this mindset?

Sure, so I think it comes with a couple of different things. It's useful to have some guiding principles or some values that a product team has that help them make decisions every day and help them unite around a common purpose. Because if you think about engineering and product and UX and marketing and sales and clients, they all have different methodologies, they have different ways of thinking. So we like to think about what is this common language we can speak as a team to what we value and what our guiding principles are. So we're trying to decide that we can kind of reach back to those. And those are things that bring us together. So having that common language, that common thing, this is how we do things, this is why we do things. And I think where people get a little bit off on that, and I'm just going to say, is they, they want to be the most agile, most design thinking, most— like, who cares? It doesn't matter. Those are tools. Those tools exist to serve the business and the customer, not to serve themselves. So having a regular language, how you talk about how you're going to do things, having a regular cadence for interacting with your customers, you know, on a weekly or every other week basis. Are you doing interviews? Are you watching people use your software? Are you out and about at industry events so that you're hearing directly from people what they're working on, what they're doing, how you can help them and serve them as customers? And everybody on the team needs to have some exposure to this. I had a client and he spent on a Sunday, 5 hours watching me do interviews and user tests. We had been doing a series of prototypes and then I expected him to stay for 30 minutes. He stayed for 5 hours because he had never seen it happen before. And that Monday he went to his team and said, everybody has to watch this. Everybody has to, you know, if you're an engineer, you take notes on a user interview. If we're testing a prototype, you take notes on that prototype so that everyone's getting some exposure to the customer, what's going on. And then, so we have a good cadence for interacting with our customers. We are bringing competitive intelligence to the team on a regular basis so they're not getting overwhelmed by it because it can easily become too much. We have a good way of managing change. So when, you know, how do we, how do we have a way of dealing with it when the CEO says, oh, I saw this cool thing. So it's just not, a 5-alarm fire drill and everybody freaks out. It's like, okay, well, you know, we're going to talk about these things on Tuesday. We're going to consider that. We'll get back to you and we'll let you know how all these things play out. So I think those are the kinds of things that you need in your organization to be successful. And those can be done in very simple ways or they can be done in highly tortured, high overhead, overly formal ways. I might suggest that you look at the former.

Well, that's great. And I think the cool thing about it is These are things that we can all do, and it's almost like habitual. It's like the more that we do them, the more it will just be commonplace for us to continue to do them. Like, at some point, if you keep doing interviews every single week, it sort of would be weird to think of a week where you're not doing interviews. And it's just like anything else, whether it's exercise or, you know, good habits usually are easier to stick once you actually, you know, practice them a little bit. So I like that. Well, we're— I mean, time's kind of flown by. We're coming to the end of our time. If we were to just— like, if you want people to leave the session and there's just one big takeaway, one thing that you want in the back of their mind for the rest of the day, what would that be?

One thing. So I'm going to go a little bit off the tangent. I thought about this last night and The number one reason why people call me or call Three Pillar isn't necessarily because they're— it's sometimes because they're concerned about their competition. Sometimes they're trying to respond to that. But the biggest problem that they have is they do— they don't minimize time to value. That when you would see that feature come out, you have to match that feature one-to-one, as opposed to saying, well, I think, you know, what's really great about that feature, it does this one thing. Here's one thing we could do that to start to create some of that value that will allow you to that would solve that, you know, one part of that very important problem that we create. So being able to take these big ideas and shrink them, you know, let's just say, okay, we think this is the big feature and does all this stuff, but this is the most important slice of it. Then let's go release that small slice of it and then see how it actually plays out and then decide. We don't always have to match things one-to-one, but we need to make sure we're solving a problem for a person and then make— solve that problem in the smallest way possible and get it out there and see what happens, and then build upon it. I think a lot of times what people are trying to do is they're trying to make this much when they really only need that much. And if we could do that much, we can probably achieve the parity that we need with our comp— our comp— our competitors, if that thing is really important. And by releasing this much, we're not spending much— too much time, it's not too much effort, it's not going to completely derail things. but we'll start to get a sense of what we need. And if that's not what they need, then, you know, we can sunset it. That's okay.

Yeah. Well, thank you for that. I think that's a great thought. And, and thank you for your time, just this whole session. This has been really fun for me. So I appreciate you joining us, Jessica, and, and I appreciate everybody else joining us for Product Lunch. We've got a couple more that are planned that are coming up. Actually, one is already— you can register for it now. It's with Greg Cohen, who just wrote a book about product leadership and product strategy that is great, just released. So that one's coming up on November 1st. And then 2 weeks after that, you can't sign up for this yet, but this will be out there in the next couple of days. We have Richard White, who's the CEO of UserVoice, and he'll be joining us as well. So I hope to see you all at future product launch sessions. And Jessica, thanks again for being here.

You're very welcome.

All right. Have a great one, everybody.

Bye-bye. Thanks for coming.