Sopheon CEO Tackles Smart Product Development Challenges on World Product Day 2021

Boom. So for the— in the interest of the recording, why doesn't everyone turn off— well, I guess if Greg is on, they're all on. So I'm gonna turn my camera off. You can turn yours off if you want. Greg, do you want people to raise a hand if they have a question? Do you want to just interrupt you if they have a question? How do you want to handle questions throughout?

I don't have a big group.

I think people can, uh, people can interrupt, uh, if they want. Uh, I have really no issue with that. Uh, and if they— or if they'd rather rather just even put something in the chat, we could move over to that as well. I think there's a chat here, isn't there?

There absolutely is.

Yeah, let me just see if I can create a chat. And then, you know, and there we go. I'll get the chat over.

Yeah, if anyone has a question, put—

don't you get a jacket? I think you do.

You know, it's like Saturday Night Live.

You know, how many— if you come back, you start getting into the 5-time club. Whatever it is, or whatever.

You're like the Alec Baldwin of Pittsburgh Product Tank.

Yeah, well, you know, and there's a lot of good analogies there. I would agree with you, Nate.

You know, you do a Trump impersonation?

Not yet, but, uh, you know, like the Billy Baldwin. Oh man.

Well, hey, thanks everybody for being here. I'm gonna jump right in.

You can see my screen.

Thank you very much.

Uh, and, uh, It is nice to see new faces and old friends. Appreciate you listening in, and I'll look for you to either interrupt me or raise your hand or type something in as we go along.

I have a subject tonight that is near and dear to my heart.

It is one of the areas that we are focusing on at Sophion, but I am not here to pitch Sophion products, but talk a lot about the problems and the issues and the challenges and how to solve those. But I also look forward to a good conversation because I know many of you have deep experience in the same space that I'll be talking about.

I labeled this "Phygital, Digical, Smart Hybrid: How Can Product Managers Meet the Challenges of Software and Hardware Innovation to Enable a Clearer View of Smart Product Realization?" Holy mackerel, there's a lot there.

That's the biggest subtitle on a slide I think I've seen in years.

Hopefully, you get the drift as we're trying to figure out how these two things go together. We're going to talk a lot about that.

About that tonight and the differences in current methodologies of building products. And as we've kind of put the peanut butter and jelly together, you know, how we can, uh, how we can make a good sandwich on time that people actually want to buy.

Um, as Nate said, it's World Product Day. Bravo!

And, uh, you know, it is great to, uh, to be here tonight and to, uh, take a little bit of your time on World Product Day to celebrate the greatness of product and being in the product space. I'm a proud product manager, and I love that product has come this far in the world that we actually have World Product Day. When I told my wife it was World Product Day, she said, "Who made that up?" I know we've come a long way, Nate. Very true. Exactly, exactly. For those of you who don't know Sophion, I'll tell you a little bit about my company. This is a little bit of shameless self-promotion. First of all, the name, people always get tripped up over the name. I got tripped over the name when I first heard it, which was, where did this come from? It's really built on two words, sophos, which means knowledge or wisdom, and ion, a house or building. We like to think of the product or the foundation of the company when it started 20 years ago was building. A house of knowledge. If I, in my maybe thought process about what Sophion delivers, is really we are a decision support system over top of a business process methodology that we've instantiated or automated in software. And so you can see when you have those two things together, you know, that's how we create insights and representation of knowledge to those in product management. You know, our journey as a company really started with product development and cross-functional work, and translated that into operational portfolios, and how you could take those initiatives and make that information from product development very actionable, and then translated that into how you could take corporate strategies and connect strategy and execution in portfolios and roadmaps, various investment buckets that you can make where you place bets on various products and capabilities or offerings, to today, which is, you know, where we have been heading with the various, with a version of our product where we're choreographing physical and digital products and to create a more timely and meaningful product realization. For those of you on the line that are dealing with both combined physical and digital products, you can realize there's a lot involved in bringing a physical and digital product combined. Even though we've been doing it for a long time, it's getting worse, I think, and some things are— and some marketplaces it's actually very new. But this gives you a little bit of the journey journey of Sophion and where we've come from and where we're headed to. As we know, as product people, and when you translate this to the strategy level of a company, only 13% of companies successfully execute their strategy.

We know the failure rate of products is damn near the same. So the disconnect between getting your product to market, product-market fit, and realization And the disconnect of creating that with strategy is, you know, it's only worse, right? So you've got 56% of all strategic initiatives are considered successful.

You know, trying to connect those two things almost like you do product-market fit between strategy and execution activities is an area that we focus on with companies, all based upon, you know, your product and offering realization. We serve a lot of terrific companies. You may be familiar with some of these companies.

They're not all high-tech, as you can, as you notice here.

There's a lot of consumer packaged goods, food and beverage companies, chemical companies, discrete manufacturing companies, B2B and B2C companies, global organizations, certainly. So we are dealing with very sophisticated large instances of helping companies through product development, through strategy and execution to bring their products to realization. So a lot of experience in, in making these companies and their innovation processes successful. In a lot of ways, companies, as you know, today continue to go through transformational change. In the past, it was these disconnected operating models and trying to get the data there. In today's world, we help companies deal with the problems of dynamic corporate planning models, as we've all witnessed in the last 12 to 18 months with COVID you know, where all of a sudden all bets are off and you have to move quickly to decide what is your business model, what changes do you have to make with your model, and what does that mean to what you thought your strategy was and how you're going to execute on it and how you make better decisions. And again, as we look in the future, and what I'll be talking about tonight is co-executing, or how we execute in this physical digital world in a much more meaningful way.

Why is this important?

For some of you that have been around making combined software and hardware products, or as I'll talk about different instances in terms of methodology, software and digital has been around, and certainly we see it even in our own lives, or maybe you work in banking, or retail, or transportation, Digital disruption, though, has not, is far from finished. It is accelerating, and it is hitting other industries that are more mature. Some ways they may even be laggards, and they are being impacted to such a point that not only are there new startups that are competing with the traditional companies effectively, like we saw, you know, years ago in the retail space, And now that's happening in other verticals. And in many cases, the survival of the company is depending on mastering this combined digital-physical product innovation. And it's new for them. Many of their assumptions about the business they're in and how they build products successfully, how they get to marketplace is radically changing, both in terms of methodologies and process, as well as the product that they themselves are delivering or what they think is the value of the product they're doing. So this is a survival call for many of these large verticals who have yet to experience what many of us have been building in terms of these combined products. And even in those combined product areas, there still remains a lot of challenges of how to build smart versus dumb products, right?

I mean, who doesn't wanna build a smart product today? Everybody wants that. Have a smart product, a connected product? Can't we monetize the data?

Can't we be in the cloud with our intelligent coffee cups and headphones and everything else?

I actually found some of these are my favorite smart products can be dumb.

I love the first one.

The first one is what's cooking?

And now, without making fun of anybody that would be physically challenged, this smart pan tells you what's in the pan and what's cooking.

Because God forbid you could look or smell or do something like that. But, you know, I guess there's a market for that smart pan somewhere. Now, just below that is how fast am I eating? Which has never really worried me as a pain point, how fast.

Now, how much and how bad it is for me, maybe I may be interested in that, but how fast am I eating? The smart fork is gonna solve that problem for us. On the upper right is another favorite one. Gee, I wonder how much water I drank today. Am I hydrated appropriately? I think if you run to the bathroom more than 10 times a day, you may know how hydrated you are.

Then of course, there's the great one, which, am I out of eggs? This is the smart connected data right on your screen of your smartphone. God forbid you should open up your refrigerator and look and count the eggs.

This can tell you while you're sitting in the comfort of wherever and tell you how many eggs you have. And, you know, if you're out of eggs, you know, it could be a bad day.

So these are some smart products that are—

these are real products, by the way, folks. These are real products. Maybe this is an example just of bad product management. I don't know. But I found them to be interesting because we can add intelligence We can make digital many physical products that are fairly meaningless.

I'm going to go back and, you know, I talked about phygital and digical and smart. Now, I may focus on this word hybrid for a while because I think in some ways hybrid actually does explain a little bit of what we're trying to do here.

And I think we understand the word hybrid and it really goes to the point of what we're trying to combine two different things, this mixed character and, you know, composed of different things.

Maybe we'll baseline that as a foundational element.

When I think of hybrid, hopefully you think of hybrid, and I think of hybrid cars, I think of the Toyota Prius, which is the benefit of being first to marketplace.

But there's also all kinds of other things that are hybrid. We've got flower breeds that are different types of one.

I think this is— Helenium is the name of this flower.

Of course, we even have animals that are hybrids, mixing— what is it?

Horses and donkeys. They make mules and all that other stuff like that.

So combining, but these are actual instantiations.

Now, how we built these, we don't really focus on a lot, but we focus on the end product just like those, those dumb products.

By the way, you may have noticed that we're in a hybrid working world, or will soon be. We're hybrid learning, we're hybrid working. Thank you COVID for bringing us Everything that could be and that may be the norm in the future.

We may not even use this word hybrid. It may just be working and learning and teaching. But, you know, combining these different ways of doing things, we're getting good at.

So as we look at hybrid products, I think there's a lot of different gradations of what we're talking about here. One is hybrid development of products, right? Hybrid development.

So there's different ways and different methodologies that are combined together to produce a product.

Then we have development of hybrid products, right, which are some of the examples I showed in these previous slides. And then finally, there's hybrid development of hybrid products, right? So I think I've combined, uh, all the combinations and permutations—

those are the right words, I think, for those of you more sophisticated in statistics than I am— all the combinations and permutations of how we can—

what we're building, how we're building them, and also what we're building, right? And we're going to take a little lens and a walk through these and talk about the issues, uh, that we, that we face.

So First of all, the hybrid development of products is combining different processes and methodologies to produce a product, right?

So that's going to be spinning—

that's my spinning plate slide, because that's, I think, how it feels for many people who are combining different methodologies to produce one outcome. And I'm going to show you some slides that hopefully capture this a little bit in a more technical detail than this beautiful— I spent hours this screen capture, so I hope you all appreciate it. I didn't even have to pay $5 for it.

Many of you may be surprised to know that there are more than two.

We sometimes think that there are only two ways to develop things, and I don't know if anyone can put their hands up or anything, or write in there if they're enjoying this slide. By the way, I did— I screen captured this, so I did not spell designing correctly. I realize it has one S, not two. So we have our favorite new 20-year-old Agile Scrum, iterative plan and release, quickly react to changes, and do our sprints. And then we have our much maligned, been with us a lifetime, very project rigid, inflexible, can't deliver on time, but damn, we know everything about where we are and what we should be doing at every step of the way. Our waterfall, stage gate type of development process.

Now, how many of you knew that there were more than just these two? Anyone out there know that there were more than just these two? Anyone using others?

Don't be shy, you can actually put it in the chat, and you know, you can No? Let's see here. Let's see if everyone— no, nothing? Okay. Well, I stumbled upon this beautiful graphic, which—

oh, Agile! That's my favorite, Martina. I think that is state of the art this day. You know, I love when I talk to people and they say, "No, no, no, no, no." And I say, "Well, what method?" "Oh, well, we're Agile, but we also still use Waterfall." So it's like, we're Agilefall.

Waterfall Agile, WAGile, right?

But there is actually all these others, like 80 different methodologies that people use to build stuff.

Value Cycle Model, and oh my God, who remembers CMMI? People actually still use that. We have our favorite Lean, PPD, and Concurrent Engineering Wheels, and all this other stuff like that.

They're all still out there.

And trust me, I've seen them all and maybe experienced a few.

So yes, we try to do these things.

We think about our traditional, you know, StageGate 5 process, waterfall-ish type model, and then our, you know, classic Agile product backlog, burndown chart, sprint tasks, sprints, and completed features. But there's lots of different ways and different variations of these that are out there.

And it gets even more complex when you're doing a portfolio set of products, or or a strategy to execution where it downfall—

it goes down into the strategy execution and all the way down to the product, right? So this becomes a real morass of hybrid development methods and models. And combining these to Martina's agile commentary, it actually creates some comfort, but also a different level of complexity of where we are and what we're doing.

Now, the second part is that's the methodology and the process, but then we have this other side, which is, oh my goodness, what are hybrid products? Well, we know some of these, you know, cars are almost computer on wheels.

And if you're driving a Tesla, it is a computer on wheels.

And you have our friendly example here of our vacuum robot, which is, you know, it's got a 3D vision system and intelligent maps out your room.

And, you know, it also sends data to your smartphone and then it collects it and compares it in terms of, you know, you can get your historical, uh, business intelligence of how many days and how well we cleaned. But my favorite one on this chart here is the spring mix that if you can see on there, it actually has a little digital part of it embedded, which not only tells if it's at the right temperature, but if there's anything that's gone bad with the spring mix.

So I mean, I think sometimes you don't realize that even in food products that there is digitization and software inherent value that goes into these products.

This is not light lunch. That's my best dad joke tonight. Spring mix could be your light lunch, but it's— so this needs to be thought out about, you know, how we're packaging all the way through the disposal phase. The other thing about these products is, as we think about them both in the development as well as the delivery, we have to think about constraints in terms of their ability to be regulated, meet compliance checking, whereas we may be able to do that on a development basis and software, it may be very difficult in terms of our supply chain and the regulatory issues and our build issues on the hardware side. So, you know, again, combining this, there's a lot of moving parts. And then we have this other aspect, as I mentioned just briefly, of it's not only embedded in the product, but then it is, you know, it's the IoT aspect of the digital is also connecting the thing. So it's not only making the actual device somewhat smarter, but it's also collecting data, and people are selling that data, And we have thousands of examples of these today, whether it's actually embedded in your body or through farming or in your smart home or whatever. So lots of different definitions of hybrid products, the value they bring, the problem they solve, and how they're built.

So lots of different names that are given to these things too.

Intelligent products, Internet of Things, servitization, all these things come along and they're referred to and they're actually meaning different, different words and different things to people. So one of the things I think that you can see as products expand is, you know, as we take our typical physical product, well, you know, the first generation of this may be something that, you know, what, you know, what need are we trying to meet? So we make that product smarter.

And then we take that product and now we make it a smart connected And then because we know it's going to fit into the ecosystem of other people making smart and connected products, is we attempt to build that further out and put it in the ecosystem so we combine information, right? And then we want to have that system of systems.

And then the question is, well, how do we combine our waterfall and stage gate or, or agile process? How do we match those so that we can align our deadline management as actually launch on time, build things that are meaningful.

One of the things I find interesting is how do we manage the lifecycle of our products?

One of the things that's fascinating is the digitization of products actually in some ways can shorten the life of what was a standard, well-to-do physical product. So you buy your new TV, and your smart TV, of course, that is connected. And it may be fine physically for 5 years or even 7 years.

But the software on it, well, you know, it's not going to be updated. We just stopped.

We're going to have a new generation of software on our new line. So your software is no longer supported and it's not updated. So this device has essentially been bricked by us.

So, you know, what does that mean? So I thought I'd get 5 years out of it and now I'm getting 3 years out of it because the software that I thought was going to be updated has now just shortened the life of this product.

Right?

And what does that mean to the company?

And so it's a different monetization and business model, right? And then what features can we use and not use that match up the delivery of this product? Lots of different questions that come around how smart connected products are transforming competition, are transforming how we build them, are transforming who we sell to and how we make money off of it.

Of them.

The failure of smart products, by the way, going more on that last point in the television example, is really, really significant.

Product launch delays.

We can see this, for instance, with the chip shortage that's happening worldwide right now. So you've got this lost revenue, lost market share, all these issues that are happening.

But there's other little things. I don't know if you caught this.

One of my favorite headlines about the 2021 Vogue The Volvo Recharge, so, couldn't ship because it's waiting a bug fix. Nothing to do with the product, but it has to do with the software. And if the software's not aligned and we can't get it out there, well, they're stuck at the port, right?

And so, hey, customers can go somewhere else. So you get this launch delay or update delay.

Who would ever think that a software functionality or bug would stop short a competitive car sale, right? You see all the other things, the classic security security issues, and some of them, as I mentioned, if software is not kept up to date, items lose functionality and also become a security risk. This also goes to product recalls, which damage reputation and brand, or just the classic late or missed opportunities. So if we don't get our hybrid build product right, and to match what our hybrid product is for our smart connected offering, there's a lot of risk in this. This process. And today, we don't have a lot of visibility into these as we build more complex systems, right?

Now, when I step back and I—

well, particularly when I teach my B2B course, which I'll be teaching later on tonight after this, I try to define—

well, let's back up. Let's talk about what's a product?

What really is a product at its core? And a product for me is not laundry detergent. It is FAD, though. Your features. It's a collection of features. And I like to put on there as well advantages and benefits, because you have to have a little product marketing with your product management, right?

But that's the essence of what it's a collection of features, advantages, and benefits, right, that we were gluing together.

We have to think about our product, our offering to the marketplace, as our fab, right? Now let me back up and I'll give you a second to take a look at this eye chart of what a product is in a very different way than that bottle of detergent.

If we look at a product as a collection of features, the other thing we have to look at is how it's delivered. And it's delivered by projects, right? And so let me try to explain a little bit of this graphic here.

And I welcome you to take a, take a perusal around it, right?

So let's start with what's above the line.

Here. So what's above the line is that collection of features and what product managers do, right?

We're identifying the segments and the need in the marketplace relative to where the company's goals are. We may be a part of a product line or defining a specific product and how that brand is there, and we know what area or physical region we may be selling to.

But we're defining the what and what all those, uh, what all those features are about and defining those features that are going to go into our product and and are going to provide us competitive advantage or solve a customer's pain, whatever that is. The underneath the line here is all project stuff. This is all the how stuff, right? How we identify these product opportunities, and we have an idea of what we need for product realization. But we also have to understand what feature realization is and how we assemble, particularly on the hardware physical product side.

We have to think about our assembly assembly preparation. And I identified this little red triangle here because we have feature realization, product realization, and assembly preparation. And between those three, we'll drill down on that, lies how we're managing our project as we go along and how we are actually going to coordinate those. Now there's another aspect to, uh, just product and projects and managing coordination and visibility And that's this issue on culture. You may have noticed that software developers have a little bit different kind of cultural view and world and work way than your hardware developers.

And this is not an— okay, I admit it's not an actual picture of a software developer I've worked with, although many that I work with look like this guy. This is, I think, like an older hippie that just was having a lot of fun. But the picture reminded me of the ponytail and sandal crowd that sometimes will be making our software product. Now, on the other side, we have our favorite office worker here with his Swingline stapler and replete with pocket protector, right? And a tie, notice a tie, who may be all right. And so their view of the world and the software person's view of the world culturally as groups Depending on the power in each group, or the maturity of the company, or the kind of the DNA of how products are built, particularly when software people are injected into a more physical product world, it is an upset culturally. So these things have to be thought about too as we're building these combined hardware and software products. Now, for companies that have always done They built the ethos, the eDNA is there, but even in those product areas where I've talked to people at major high-tech companies where, you know, there's the hardware person and that's the foundation, that's all we can do, and the software person has to work with the resulting part of whatever came up in hardware, and that's just the world, right? And so this is a tension, a culture tension that we also have to be aware of. Besides the kind of the data analysis and insight that when we're building these products.

Let me go back to that picture I showed you before.

And again, I'm gonna show you a different view of this. And so when you see this hybrid smart product network, and this is, I want you to think about if I talk about my three examples of, this is us trying to build a hardware product, right? But we're also, we may be using different methodologies.

We may be using Stage-Gate for everything, or Waterfall for everything, or attempt to use newer technology—

newer ways like SAFe, kind of the industrial-scale Agile methodology. You may be combining those in this picture.

But we have different releases that we're building out. You can see we have software releases under various different project work that we're doing. And we have combined hardware and software that we're all trying to coordinate and release for this, let's call it product 4.2.

And then of course, we have to think about sustaining work, increase work for the next release, et cetera. And this gives you an idea of the complexity between what goes above the line and what goes below the line of the problem that we're trying to solve. Now, if we break down what is really happening in that picture, we've got business leadership, we've got functional leaders, we've got engineering or development leaders, and we've got product people, you know, the product leaders, and they're all trying to coordinate this, and they've got all their own systems. We've got, uh, classic project management, maybe using Primavera or MS Project, or, you know, using Asana or Trello or something over here, right?

Then you got your collaboration tools— God forbid we don't have one of those— and most of those come in the form of Office or G Suite or some bespoke system that we wrote ourselves.

Then we have our ERP/PLM systems because we have to track our product components and bill of materials and what's coming in the supply chain and what we built and can we build that and we'll make sure it's going to come on time.

Oh, and we have these guys down here, our software development tools, and we'll talk a little bit about those. So we have our software projects and we also have our release cadence and, you know, we're using products like Jira and things along those lines to, to track our features and what we're doing. And we're hoping through all these lines and all these people, it's just going to come together. It's all going to just work out. We hope that our Tableau business intelligence decision system that we made for ourselves is going to give us the on-time visibility that we, that we desire. I'm going to put something else in the middle here because there's— I'm going to define the problem a little bit better.

So there's planning that needs to be done between these different groups, but there's also been the realization, the continuous monitoring of your plans so that you can have your red flags.

So whether your project information, your collaboration tools, your ERP system, particularly with your financials, or any of these software development tools and development environments you're working with, you know, these all go into the stew that you have to say, oh, I'm planning this, kind of like our chart, and then we have to execute this.

And where are those gaps, right?

So let me just blow that up for a minute so you can take a good look at this, because this is what we're trying to figure out.

We're trying to figure out our product line, product branding. We're trying to figure out our— are we meeting our KPIs?

Are we meeting our revenue goals?

And then how are we doing that in the weeds of product management or product realization? Our sustaining work that we need to do, our assembly preparation, most importantly, our feature realization, right, that we need to do. That needs that continuous monitoring relative to where we are. I like to look at this as what really needs to be done to make this right because of the number of people, the different cultural issues, the complexity of methodologies. All these things need to come together together on what I call the coordination table.

That is—

think of it as a governance framework.

This is where we really match up the business side with the realization side so that we know we are getting the right new feature selection.

We're meeting the KPIs of the business. We have clarity about the product definition.

We understand the technology alignment.

Most importantly, that bottom risks, delays, and changes. Risks, delays, and changes. If these aren't visible in that continuous monitoring relative to our planning, this is where things become a wreck. So we can be working our StageGate process with our supply chain through our ERP to build our, our physical product, where our software people are doing their 2-week sprints and building out their product and delivering, and it can just be a train wreck, an absolute train wreck.

So I look at this and I say, okay, let's, let's look at this hybrid development of hybrid products, right? We're going to have again the same thing where we're going to look at our product innovation strategy, we look at our enabling technologies, our different products, product lines, all the way down to our features, right?

And we need to make sure that we have visibility across our, our PLM and our, and our in this case, Jira is matching it across our epics, all the way up through our technology department, and across the way to delivering. This is the kind of things that we need to be thinking about as we're building this hybrid development of hybrid products.

And at the key to all this is, how do you meet the challenges going back to the initial question that I offered and titled for this session?

How can you meet the challenges of the software and hardware innovation of smart product realization. Well, it can happen. Dogs and cats can live together, right? And it comes together on governance. The key is governance.

You know, if you're building hybrid development, hybrid products, you're probably not at that governance table where you really have it as a well-oiled machine.

We tend to use separate methodologies, different tools, and bringing that together and that governance is going to help you not only build these types of products, but it's going to give you the clarity and visibility to coordinate those activities to allow you insight where today it could be done extremely manually and allow a lot of risk.

And we see that evidence with those failures that I talked about earlier.

So with that, I hope I've given you some insights into the different instantiations, uh, what we're—

what I'm talking about about. I'm going to look over the questions. There's a couple questions that popped up. Let me answer those first.

One by Randy: Is security a subset of competition? It could be. I think it's—

I think when we think about governance—

when we think about, I'm sorry, regulation, security, all these items, you know, we all want these things like the old days of quality. You don't want the product built and then you think about the security issues and meeting regulatory compliance at the end of that So they have to be built into the process and measured along with those key performance indicators. It's absolutely key.

You know, it has to come along.

It's like you can't, you know, check the quality at the end of the process. You have to do it during the process. The security process of these combined products is incredibly sophisticated, and we can see by by the sophistication of the various hacks, whether it's, you know, pure ransomware or a man-in-the-middle type of tax or whatever it is. It's a combination of them exploiting known hardware and software. So there are multiple ways of getting into various systems. If we're not thinking about it at the application layer as well as at the physical firmware layer or even at the chip component layer as we're building the product, we are not gonna provide the right security levels the final product that we're delivering, particularly for dealing with more sensitive delivery of products to, let's say, government, DOD, things along those lines. You're just not going to meet the criteria, right?

The second question, Martina, another great question. Can you elaborate what I mean on governance? Great question.

So when I think about governance, I'm thinking about how do you make sure you have the choreography, the coordination between these different activities and visibility so that if there are gaps, if there are risks, it's not too late for you to fix them. You want to make sure that you're coordinating these activities and that you understand when you're bringing together, for instance, an 8-week sprint by software that's depending on physical product being ready so that they can apply that and test that, that those two things are coming together at the same time, particularly as you maybe are requiring them to come to integrate to a third-party system or package those up for delivery.

And if one is off from the other, you want to know that, as I like to say, bad news early is good news, right? Bad news early is good news. So that governance that I'm talking about is that ability to govern those processes.

Because for instance, if we know that we've got a few more weeks because there's a delay in the supply chain or the build-out of our hardware, maybe we can fit more of our software backlog or do more testing on our software, or whatever is valuable to some of the customer in an additional sprint, right?

Or remove some of the backlog, and then we can combine those together.

So it's that level of visibility and decision-making that I'm talking about when I use the word governance. I hope—

and by the way, Randy and Martina, did I answer your questions?

Yes, thank you so much.

Do we have other questions? I know I went through a lot of materials.

Let me pop this one slide— yeah, that's it— one slide back up because I think this is really the key to that governance table.

Nate, no questions? Nick, Nick, don't you live this every day at Cisco?

Yeah, I was going to turn the video off because it was very painful.

If you wouldn't mind, without disclosing anything, I mean, Cisco has got to be one of the most experienced companies, and I've talked to not Cisco directly, but, but some of your competitors and other people that are in similar business And it's amazing that a company that's been doing this successfully for 30 years, these issues exist, right?

Well, especially when you're talking about doing hardware and software development. So I work on optics here, and it's hard. There's a hardware component, a software component, and even the software component in the best case can take a year to develop. So when you're trying to align your software development and your hardware development and you're talking to two different engineering teams, there doesn't seem to be just like a Great, great way to go about that without trying to herd cats, you know, spin the plates.

Yeah, and I hope you agree with my— there's the cultural things, there's the way that they build, but it's very different mentality about how they build products and then what they think the product's value is, right? And between the— between teams and groups.

Yeah, definitely. The, the Poindexters over at the hardware want everything correct and analyzed organized and on a spreadsheet. And then with, with the software, I'm like, can we get it in this release? They're like, yeah, maybe. And I'm like, is that a yes? They're like, well, we'll let you know.

So, you know, and as a friend of mine used to say, you know, it's very hard. He was building some type of specific defibrillator that, you know, for your, for your heart.

He said, you know, we really just can't do an MVP. We don't put it in there and it, you know, hey, okay, well, that one didn't work, and, but, you know, we'll get back on release 2.0, we'll save some lives, you know. It's got to be right the first time.

Don't want to be a beta tester on a defibrillator.

No, no, no, you know, that'd be a problem. That'd be a problem.

Greg, Harsh, Josh, Teranum, I hope I'm saying your name correctly. If I'm not, I apologize. Dennis, Martina, other questions?

I have two questions for you. One of them is related to product management and product development as a field of study because it's a field, it's quite new field, and Carnegie Mellon University is one of the few that already has a master's program in product. But can you are you familiar if other universities are also implementing it? And then second question is related to software to manage product, such as Sprintboard or Pendo. I'm curious if you have any recommendations on which products to use for product.

Well, we have the Intergalactic Executive Director of Carnegie Mellon University, one of the most prestigious universities in the world right here tonight, Brad Iban, and I can tell you that there may be competitors out there, but there are none better than the Master's in Product Management program.

I'm not in the least bit biased, but go ahead, Brad.

And we also have the founder of said program with us today. Just said a lot of words.

I, you know, there are other master's degrees out there that do graduate people that end up in product management, and still there is the traditional MBA. Nick is a product of the Katz School and a proud MBA from University of Pittsburgh and a product manager today. But I do think, and I do mean this in all seriousness, having worked with Brad and worked at Carnegie Mellon, it is just, if you want to be a product manager, it is as razor-focused and And it's a great program to give you all the skills that you need to graduate and go to work and get the product management job of your dreams. It's just a, it's a well thought out program and it gives you all the, you know, all the skill sets that you're gonna need and the network of people that you're gonna need to be successful in this space.

I'm curious where the alumni usually end up. Up? Are they, are they being captured by all the amazing startup and entrepreneurial system in Pittsburgh, or are they like moving all over the country and all over the globe?

Great, Greg, I can take that. It's, it's a little bit of all of the above, Martina. It's, of course, there are a lot that end up in, in the West Coast, the Bay Area, Seattle, Seattle. We're starting to see a lot of interest from Amazon, so they snap up large numbers recently. We have some that go to startups, some that go healthcare because that's so big in Pittsburgh.

We—

we—

Greg did a lot of discussion on automotive industry. We just placed one there for the first time, and it's a young program too, so we're still— every year is a a new prototype test of sorts for us. We're trying to figure out exactly what to expect as a steady state. But so far we don't have a steady state. It's every cohort has a different personality, different level of experience. And we're in a building stage still, but we're in a stage also where we're starting to see these students disperse between the the, the, the FAANG-type companies and the big companies, and then also down to the startups, the entire spectrum really. And some are more technical than others, and some, um, it's even with our incoming students, some are more design-focused, some are more data-focused. Um, we, we have a few mechanical engineers on the topic of this hardware discussion this year, so it's, it's kind of a nice mix. And, and to Martina, I, I would be glad to discuss it, like, not to make this a sales pitch, but I'd be glad to discuss the program and other alternatives and help you find, help you sort what is right for you without being a sales pitch.

You also asked about, uh, products that are out there for product managers.

It is a burgeoning space. There are a lot of tools that are out there. You mentioned Pendo and I mean, one of the most popular tools out there is the whole category of road mapping. You have AHA and ProductPlan and all these other products that are out there.

They're very visual tools.

I wouldn't say they're execution tools, but they're very visual tools. You also have products like Pendo and their competitors, which are giving you insights and analytics about utilization and usage. I would suggest if you want a great chart of all the different areas of software for product managers, there's a group called Product Craft, C-R-A-F-T. Go to their site, they actually have a, they actually keep a kind of a living chart of all the different pieces of software that are out there that product managers use or deploy from very large companies that produce them to startups. And it's a very well-done comprehensive list of tools that are out there for product managers. And it's nice to see, you know, we talked about World Product Day, it's nice to see all a celebration of product managers and product, but it's great to see that, you know, 10 years ago there weren't dedicated tools for product managers. Just didn't happen, right?

Yeah. Do you have any familiarity with Productboard? I'm just asking because I'm Czech and it's a Czech-based company, it's like a Czech unicorn that made it worldwide, but I haven't tried it myself.

Yeah, there's a—

it's a crowded market, there's a lot out there for Okay. Mona, did you have a question that we could answer for you? No, I'm sorry, I just joined very late.

I apologize. That's quite all right.

Any other questions or comments? Nate, do you have any wrap-up questions or comments?

I, I don't. This was very good.

Good.

So those of you who joined late, we will be posting this to YouTube. We recorded it. So you and those of you who want to watch it again, you can, you know, you can, you can enjoy Greg and all of his Gregisms on YouTube. So, so we'll be posting the link to YouTube probably tomorrow at some point, and I'll send that out to the, to the group both through LinkedIn LinkedIn and through, uh, the, uh, the meetup. So with that, uh, we don't have our next one scheduled yet. Probably in, in, you know, the summer months are always questionable. Should we do it? Should we not? You know, I'm thinking maybe by— we do it every 2 months-ish, so maybe by the end of July, maybe, maybe we can use our sponsorship with, with, uh, with Brad and in, in the CMU group.

I want the pizza. I want the pizza.

Personally. We'll get a slice delivered to your house.

I'll fly back to the US if Brad's buying pizza.

I'm there, man.

We'll mail you a slice too, Nick. So, so yeah, so stay tuned for, um, for the next meetup on, on the meetup page. We'll post it. And also, if you're not part of the LinkedIn group, uh, maybe join that as well, because then you'll, you'll see these posts kind of just in your feed when we have a new one every month and a half, 2 months. You'll just see it show up and then you can have visibility that way. So with that, Greg, I thank you for your time. And everyone have a great night. Go Penns! Go Penns! It's 2 to 1.

Thank you, everyone. Nice to see some familiar faces.

Be well and be safe.

Thanks, Greg.

Bye now.

Bye.