Nis Frome is the producer of a new podcast for product managers and developers called, “This is Product Management,” which is sponsored by Alpha UX. He is also the Director of Demand Generation at Alpha UX, a software validation platform that provides real-time user insights. In addition, he is an award-winning software developer and web designer, and he frequently goes by the title of “Storyteller.” He shares what this title means to him during  the interview.

 

Practices and Ideas for Product Managers, Developers, and Innovators

Highlights from the discussion include:

• The importance of storytelling is learning the story of the customer – making sense of the customer’s problem and the best solution that provides the most value.
• The podcast, “This is Product Management,” that Nis produces addresses specific challenges that product managers encounter.
• The podcast emphasizes digital products, but the content is applicable to anyone working on products in companies, regardless if you are a product manager or not.
• The concept of the minimal viable product has been misapplied in larger organizations – it was designed for startups, not enterprises.
• Instead of MVPs, large organizations should think in terms of minimal viable experiments – quickly running low-cost experiments to test hypotheses and learn what the customer needs.
• Of the topics covered so far on the This is Product Management Podcast, demand validation is one Nis explored further during our interview. Demand validation occurs before optimizing a product and involves a single type of experiment that demonstrates at least one customer is interested in the product concept – getting from zero customers to one customer.
• The tools used for demand validation Nis discussed, going from zero to one, include:
  • In-person interviews. Ask potential customers about the problem, how they solve it, other solutions they have considered, is it an important problem, etc. The benefit of in-person interviews is what can be added through the body language observed. People to interview can be found through existing relationships, past and current customers, paid ads, and other means.
  • Interactive prototyping. Creating an initial software prototype and asking customers to provide feedback on it can lead to valuable insights in just a few hours. Variations in the prototypes split tested with different cohorts of customers can be used to identify the best approaches to aspects of the problem. Nis works for Alpha UX, which provides a platform for rapidly testing different user interfaces of software products.

Useful Links

• This is Product Management Podcast.
• Follow Nis on Twitter.
• Alpha UX for split testing software interfaces for rapidly gaining insights from customers.

 

Innovation Quote

“We are kept from our goals not by obstacles but by a clear path to a lesser goal.” -Robert Brault

 

Listen Now to the Interview

Subscribe: Google Podcasts | Stitcher | TuneIn | RSS

Raw Transcript

tei016_nis_frome

 

Thanks!

Thank you for being an Everyday Innovator and learning with me from the successes and failures of product innovators, managers, and developers. If you enjoyed the discussion, help out a fellow product manager by sharing it using the social media buttons you see below.