597: What makes a breakthrough product? – with Deirdre Walters

Many products fail. Anyone who's spent time in product development knows it. The question is why? And actually that was the question that drove my PhD research. Usually it's not because technology was bad. It's not because the team wasn't smart or wasn't working hard enough. It's because somewhere between the whiteboard idea and the actual product launch, we lost the plot and the user got forgotten. The team optimized what they could build or what made maybe they wanted to build instead of what someone actually needed. My guest today has spent over 30 years with this gap. Deidre Walters spent 15 years at Procter and Gamble across R and D, manufacturing and marketing. And while she was there she co developed something called the Technical Product Story Framework. P and G and others still use it today. In 2012 she co founded Untapped Innovation, an award winning consultancy that works with some of the biggest names in consumer goods. Unilever, Kellogg's, PepsiCo, Kimberly Clark and more, helping them build products that they actually win in the marketplace. Now you might be thinking I work in software, not shampoo or cereal. What does consumer goods have to do with me? The answer is more than you expect, regardless of the industry you're in. And if you're listening to our discussion, would rather watch it on video, simply go to our YouTube channel. Search for product mastery now on YouTube. Okay, jump in right after this. How can you unlock your full potential as a product manager? We're sharing the product management insights you need. They are based on the seven research backed knowledge areas for product mastery. You'll learn to create products customers love, enhance your influence and elevate your career. Welcome to Product Mastery now hosted by Dr. Chad McAllister, Product Management professor, practitioner and your guideline, Deidre. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having me. It's lovely to meet you. Likewise. Love the accent as well. You're joining us across the pond I guess as they say over in the UK today. But I'm curious about where you started at. Right, so P and G was the place that you developed several products. 15 years there. Tell us, give us a sense of what kind of products you contributed to. Yeah, sure. So I joined P and G directly from university. I was a chemistry graduate from University College Dublin and I studied started actually in their manufacturing program. So I started a little bit further away from the consumer and I spent two years there working on Olay Olay Total Effects, Olay Regenerist, so the moisturizing side of skin care. And RD colleagues at the time said I was Far too nosy, I think, to work in manufacturing. And I would drive them a little bit crazy asking why are we doing this and why are we putting that ingredient in there and why are you changing? So they said there was this role or a position in R and D called product research, which is very unique actually to Procter and Gamble. And so these are a body of scientists and engineers whose job it is to do consumer understanding, spend time with consumers, poke around in their bathroom cupboards, in their kitchen cupboards to see what they're using and why, and then effectively become the linchpin and start to brief technologists, start to build out what the product should look like and then working with commercial counterparts around kind of claims and demos and how we might be able to demonstrate points of difference in market. So I had no idea that role existed and absolutely loved it when I got there. So the assignments I worked on there was antiperspirants and deodorants. You're probably familiar with brands such as Secret and Allspice. And particularly at the time we worked with the central European markets, I spent a lot of time in Russia and Hungary, which was fantastic, and then moved from there into oral care. So I went across around the time Whitestrips was launching in Europe. So I spent some time on Whitestrips very differently spent some time on fixadent denture adhesives. So a whole different set of consumer needs. And then oral B toothpaste and toothbrushes. And that would have been around the time when I left. So about 15 years, but quite a tour of a variety of different sectors and products. That's really interesting because I know when I read your bio at that strong R and D sort of focus, but you had this opportunity to do face to face consumer research in people's homes. Right. And that opens the door to the opportunity to have deeper empathy for the customer. Right. And actually understanding what the customer's dealing with. How did you see that play back and forth with your kind of R and D trajectory and also that strong consumer focus trajectory? Yeah, it was. I think it's just human understand. Human understanding has always fascinated me actually, even when I was doing a chemistry degree, I was reading psychology at the same time. So I think the fact that this role was able to kind of pull those two things together for me was very compelling. I think it's. Human beings are just so interesting. We say one thing and we don't mean to lie and rely. Right. And we were so lucky to start. We always say this with P and G At the time because user research was inordinately human facing. So as I said, we were in people's houses, we were poking around in bathrooms and you can joke and laugh with people. And you said, hang on a second, you told me you never bought that brand. I've just found five tubes of that toothpaste in the back of your cupboard and they're like, oh yeah, it was an offer I forgot it was an offer I bought. So, you know, people will say one thing and actually in reality it's something quite different. And digital methods have moved on quite a lot. We do a lot now where consumers do little video tours of their home or safari. So while we're not physically in there with them, we still are on a big mission to make sure that we really get the full picture in actually what's happening behind the scenes rather than the claimed data that possibly sits a little bit on top. Right, yeah. I'm so glad you mentioned that. As you said, we don't intend to lie or misrepresent things, but when we're asked questions, just like AI these days, we like to give an answer. Right. And we don't want to hallucinate, we're not trying to mislead, but we do get a different understanding of what is actually going on with the customer when we see them in their own environment. Right. And we see them performing the task or using the products. And there's lots of good insights in that. I'm curious, kind of with that intersection of sounds like really fascinating experiences there at P and G, how do you reflect on that time? Were there things that you learned there that you think you probably would not have come across other places? There's been a lot of innovators that P and GS produced. It seemed like a good incubator for such things. Yeah, I mean, I think, number one, I still remember it from the beginning. Even in manufacturing, we were taught consumer is boss, shareholders are important, suppliers are important, the store and the retail are important, but the consumer was boss. I think originally it may have come from Sam Walton of Walmart, but it was quite a shared ethos, I think, between P and G and Walmart at the time. And I'm not sure any other company completely embodied it as much as P and G at the time. And I think that's something that's just deeply hardwired. The other thing that was very unique, I think, to P and G at the time, you were handed these enormous projects from day one and you weren't really treated like an intern that that was your project, that you were uniquely responsible. And they had this big, I think they were called success factors at the time around ownership and you were expected to own that project. So a little bit daunting, but as a result, you get to accrue a ton of experience very quickly. And then the last bit that I think was my personal favorite, P and G, and particularly R and D, was really strong on creating what they call communities of practice. So you'd have people who were in the part of the product research community or had a specific interest maybe in claims and demos development, and they would just have lunchtime talks a bit like, I guess the precursor to the podcast back in the day. And it was like a library. You just grabbed your lunch and you went along and not everybody went, but whoever wanted to go could go, typically. And you were just exposed. And obviously being a global company that might be visiting thought leaders from different parts of the company, different sectors within the company. So we were just exposed to so many different schools of thought and projects at the time. I think that that's quite a unique aspect of P and G. Yeah, absolutely. I love the focus on the consumer, that they're a boss. The communities of practice are special when you bring in people from across the functions and different domain knowledge and just the opportunity to talk with each other and network. I don't remember if I read this or if someone had told me the story that once 3M looked at one year where the key innovations came from, kind of, what was that journey of those innov and they tracked down a large percentage of them. I think it was the majority of them to lunch conversations with one person. Like people had this idea and there was this one person that they all had lunch with over different time. Right. That he was just a good networker and said, oh, you should go talk to this person in the company. And formalizing those communities of practice helps with that. Right. It helps us to understand our resources and getting those different domain knowledge and perspectives in place completely. And actually, when we left P and G, my co founders were all people I'd met through those community practice. So we hadn't worked directly sitting next to each other on a project or on a particular category. We were all in different categories. And it was the communities of practice actually that brought us together. So we're still a living and breathing community practice. Yeah. Moving forward, helping companies now. Yeah, yeah, that's right. Let's talk about you leaving P and G. What was going on? Did you see an opportunity? Were there Things you wanted to do with carrying innovation to other companies. Was there a hole that companies needed help with? You built untapped for some reason? Yeah, I mean some necessities of adventure and P and G was going through a round of redundancies at the time and actually my co founders and I kind of spoke to one another. So I think some of it is down to the window of opportunity that we had. We were very lucky. We got a package and it kind of packed a parachute for a period of time from a revenue perspective. So that was helpful. I think the other piece though we reflected on just from a business need is as I said, the product research function is very unique to P and G. And typically the majority of consumer goods companies, R and D doesn't have a user understanding ARM or it doesn't have a capability baked in. Some of them are getting better, but more often than not, even today they're still missing that consumers. You often hear that marketing owns the consumer and R and D, even though they've got to develop a product for somebody, isn't always awarded the budget or the capability by which to go and actually understand who needs to use it and what targeting looks like. So that was our window of opportunity. And I think if you look at the agency space, there are a lot of agencies out there for marketing. There's a lot of agencies out there for advertising, for insight. There's very few for R and D. And so that for us was a big business opportunity. Have you seen changes in that over the last 12 years? When I think about R and D some time ago, I don't know how long ago, a few decades. Right. R and D was largely kind of that pure research environment. Right. Solve problems that might come up. But they weren't necessarily charged with creating new revenue opportunities directly tied to customers. They were working towards those things and having more of a consumer perspective in them certainly makes them more focused. And that's a change that appears to happen in many industries is they have been much more refocused on our work needs to be revenue driving in a reasonable time frame. What have you seen take place? Yeah, I think it varies from company to company. I think that the typical, if I kind of give you the stereotype, some of the medium sized or maybe the ones that haven't maybe been as schooled in years of understanding. We hear a lot from the R and D clients that we speak to. I just want to get in front of the brief. So they'll typically be given a brief by the commercial organization to develop a certain type of product or perhaps support a certain type of claim strategy. And we know that R and D lead times are long if they're developing a new feature, if they're developing a new piece of packaging, typical lead times even for a fragrance or a flavor line extension can be 12 to 18 months. So by the time that they get the brief and actually can address it, most of those products can be a little bit me too or a bit generic in market. And ultimately what R and D is trying to do, really what they're craving, I think, is to leapfrog the brief and get in front of it so that they can kind of turn the conversation around with their commercial counterparts and say, well, actually, here's the possibilities. What would you like to go for? So rather than kind of maybe copying a competitor execution, it really allows R and D to be much more proactive and get on the front foot. Imagine what a future could look like for the user. And the only way to do that leapfrogging is by deeper user understanding. If you don't understand that it's a lottery whether this technology will be right or not right. Is there some tension that you find in you're from R and D. As you help companies that are focused, you're with the R and D groups. Is there a tension there? Because there is the. I'm an engineer by background love science. There is that perspective. Like I know better because I know how to make things work right. I know the chemistry that is needed here versus the customer is boss. There's the possibility for attention to arise between those two things. Just the way people approach the work less than you'd imagine. I think. I think scientists and engineers, I mean, you can't speak for everybody, but I think scientists and engineers tend to be incredibly curious people. And I would say generally technically curious. So I think. And we'll talk about some of the tools and frameworks that we use. But as well as being curious about the solution, I think if you give R and D and scientists and engineers the possibility to be curious about the problem and approach it and why is something. So if it's a certain unmet need, why is that need not being met today? What is it about the current product that's deficient in some way? You use the same kind of root cause methodology on the problem as much as the solution. So I think sometimes I think R and D has just not been given the space and very frequently not been given the budget by which to kind of go and do that investigative work. I think Typically the budgets are allocated for what you would kind of call the formulation of the solution rather than the discovery of the problem and the deeply underlying reasons for that. And if you understand the problem in much more depth, the chances that the solutions will address it increase significantly. So I don't think it's a lack of curiosity as much as potentially a budget stage gate innovation approach that doesn't ask those questions early enough. Yeah. And doesn't get them involved with the customer early enough. Right, Precisely. I found that in my engineering work, particularly software development. If I could get the senior architect out with me with customers early, that was so much better than waiting later when the requirements were some written form and harder to understand, frankly, at that point without having the contact with the customer. Okay. So any good scientist and engineer will tell you that there's never one solution to a problem. Right. So I think from a return investment point of view, it just makes really good business sense to have those scientists and engineers involved earlier because if they really understand the problem, likelihood is they'll come up with four or five or six different technical solutions and you've got a pipeline right there, rather than just chasing one solution and optimizing for that without the knowledge that it's even the right one in the first place. Right. So I think problem definition is just smart business. Yeah. And as you said, that understanding of the customer's problem really helps to inform the solutions. The better we understand the customer's problem, the better job we can do. And that just gets glossed over too many times with my university professor hat on, have team projects with teams coming up with a new concept and developing that through. And they don't want to spend the time that we really need to spend in exploring the problem and who has that problem. So appreciate you emphasizing that. Let's get into your framework here. I don't know if this is still the technical product story, how you think about it, but what is that framework that came out of your work there at P and G that you help with companies today and making these connections with the customer? Yeah, it's a framework that we used while in P and G and it was really, we call the technical product story at the time, the story of what's going on. So what's going on with the consumer? And how might a solution be the right thing to meet their needs? Since we've left P and G, we've elevated and streamlined it further, actually, because obviously we now have to apply that same framework to food and beverage, consumer healthcare, as well as beauty and personal care. And it actually has its roots way back in screenwriting. So you've got anybody who likes to geek out on story, you've got Joseph campbell and the 12 steps to. To a great story. I mean, if we did 12 steps with our corporate clients, I think they'd fire us immediately. It's complicated for the corporate crew. So we distill it down to four chapters, basically, and the story is how we work it through. And the initial two chapters are exactly what we've just been speaking about. So chapter one focuses on the consumer need. So what is it that they're. If it's beauty care, it's sometimes not even a pain point, It's a wish that they're shooting for. Sometimes if it's in home care, it's a problem or a pain point in a product. So that chapter one really kind of uncovers what's going on for the consumer and as you would, I would imagine, in a software program, understands the highs and lows of the user experience in the context particularly of that problem. Chapter two, then, really speaks to our scientists and engineers interrogation that we talked about. Chapter two is all about the root cause. So what is the specific root cause of that problem and why does it exist? And what are the scenarios or the evidence of that turning up in everyday life for the consumer? And then we move on to chapter three, and that's where we talk and we have the, as Joseph Campbell would say, the meeting of the mentor. So chapter three introduces the solution. So introducing Olay with something or Febreze with something. And the technology positioning statement must reflect the user need and the root cause that we've set up in chapter one and chapter two. And then we move into chapter four, which effectively is the happy ever after. So what happens? What's the benefit of using this new product and how has the world changed as a result? Where it comes from in that context, we know in the neuroscience, I think there's some claimed data out there that stories are 20 times easier to understand, they're 20 times easier to remember, and importantly, 20 times easier to action. And what's really important here, as you said with the meeting of the mentor, what we haven't given it is a list of 20 features. The discipline that comes from the storytelling is making sure that whatever unmet need we've set up in chapter one is the train of thought that's carried throughout the arc of the story all the way to the happy ever after. If there's more than, and there often is, in categories more than One unmet need. What we encourage teams to do then is to write multiple stories. So rather than trying to shoehorn or cram four unmet needs into the start, 20 different aspects of the product and four different benefits at the end, what we try and do is we pull them apart into single minded stories. And again, that's where the return on investment comes from. Because what you end up with is even with one technology invention or one new molecule, you end up with four, potentially more than four stories within a pipeline. So you end up with kind of a six month, a 12 month, an 18 month, a 24 month communication window. But the art is keeping it super single minded so that the consumer really understands that it was made for them in the context of that unmet need. Typically what you'll see in the ratio of the story in the framework as well is that you'll have seen that only 25% of that arc content is the new product articulation. And I think if you do a straw audit or poll of the average product that's sitting on a supermarket shelf, it's the other way around. You'll often see over 80% of the comms talks about the product when actually the shift should be the other way around. And we have a joke we've been telling for years. We say the story was called Cinderella, not new Amazing Fairy godmother with triple effect Princess magic. Which is kind of the FMCG approach when we kind of of don't follow our own advice. Right. So that's the coaching that we give teams again and again, if you're going to market, is to make sure that only 25% of their comms needs to be talking about the fairy godmother. 75% of it really needs to be either on the root, the unmet need, the interrogation or the happy ever after that comes as a result of using it. Very good. So I suspect the story element here, the story focus has many benefits for you doing this with an organization, right inside the organization. It's a great way for the people involved to communicate this to others, to influence senior leaders and start getting support for this. Because we do like a story, like you said, we remember stories that are very compelling, not just a list of benefits or features for a customer. And they kind of get people united towards a vision. Right. That creates energy itself. And it also becomes the elements of what can be part of marketing communications to make our ideal customer. They're aware we understand their part of the story and we have a way to enhance life for them by Answering their problems or needs. Yeah. And we've talked about how you use it there. Yeah, yeah. Picking up on your last point, we've got data to show that, actually. So the commercial organization tends to be more heavily involved in what they'll call concept development. So what's kind of the insight? What's the benefit? What's the RTB kind of. And we liken that to kind of the headline of an newspaper article. But you don't write the headline before you've written the article. Any good journalist will tell you. You interrogate it, you gather all your notes, you write the story, and the last thing you do is you write the headline. In the innovation process, in concept development, somehow we do it the other way around and we start writing concepts before we fully interrogated what's going on with the consumer and what's going on with the product. So what we've proven is that teams who do this kind of story arc narrative development through the process get consistently higher concept results as a consequence. Because it's much more well thought through. The narrative arc is obvious and the consumers find the ideas much more appealing at the end. It also speeds it up significantly. So we know, talking to some client teams that they can spin their wheels on concept development 6 months, 12 months down the line, and they're still not hitting kind of all of the greens on their scorecard, whereas the teams that do this kind of narrative framing at the beginning hit green from the beginning. So you can save up to 12, 18 months on an initiative timeframe, which is significant. Yeah, yeah. That catches people's attention, especially senior leaders. Absolutely. So in your four chapters here, and kind of the Joseph Campbell story thing, we have the notion of the hero and the guide or the mentor. Right. And so your chapter three is all about the mentor. I'm hoping that your hero, which you did a call out, is the customer. And I think a lot of companies get this mixed up, frankly, that they think we're the hero for providing the solution as opposed to seeing our customer as a hero. How do you think about that in this framework? Exactly as you've just articulated. So you're exactly right. The consumer is the hero in the story. And it's amazing how even just in kind of throwaway language, and they talk about the hero claim or the hero insight, the hero is the consumer and that's who we're trying to help at the end of the day. And it seems like a very simplistic view, but actually it's the statement that whether somebody works in manufacturing in the factory or whether they work in marketing or whether the ad agency. As soon as you help people to understand that the hero is the consumer. The other analogy we sometimes use is I guess that of the movie world and saying, well, your supporting actors kind of stealing the stage. It needs to understand who the lead is in this situation. And the lead is always the consumer, the end user, and how the product is there to help. And that's where it then moves into the jobs to be done framework. Because we always phrase emotional and functional jobs to be done as helping the consumer to do something. So if it's a functional job, what are we trying to help them to functionally do? If it's an emotional job, what are we helping them to feel? So it's a verb, it's not a noun. And the noun sometimes can take over. And so it's those helping words, I think, for where does the consumer need help? That's the mindset shift that many organizations really need. Yeah, it's such an important point about the job to be done there. Right. So job to be done language, that functional job, the social job, the emotional job. For me, if a product doesn't make any kind of emotional connection, it's going to be a product that gets displaced quickly by a competitor that figures that out. Right. And understanding that emotional aspect is really key and important for us as well. I wonder, do you have an example that you can share? I don't know if you have. If you can name names or not, that doesn't really matter. But to kind of walk us through applying these chapters to a real world problem. And I'm really kind of curious if we see the emotional job in there too. 100%. I don't think we've ever worked on a product that hasn't had an emotional job to be done. So we always, we have to scavenge for both. Yeah, we've got a couple. One product that we worked on about five, well, probably six years ago for Kimberly Clark, they have an Andrex toilet tissue brand across the world actually particularly we were looking at the UK business. So what they wanted to do this particular part of their portfolio to elevate the cleaning result that the consumer was getting. So obviously we had to go and do some user research. It's a very sensitive category. It's not something that everybody wants to discuss at length. Going to the bathroom and wiping and the downsides and the pain points of wiping. So we moved the conversation onto a more projective space around just tell us about cleaning in general and things that clean well and things that clean badly. And in that case, what consumers were saying to us was in particular, and we talk about the power of a gold standard when it comes to product development. In this case, it came up repeatedly was the idea of a microfiber cloth that people use to clean bathrooms, kitchens. And so again, being scientists and engineers, we wonder why is that better than something else? And they would say, well, and you could see consumers picking up these microfiber cloths and literally kind of pulling it apart, not apart, but kind of pulling at it in front of ours. And they were saying, well, it's three dimensional and it's kind of got these. And it kind of gets into the nooks and crannies around my sink and I can get to it, but it's also incredibly soft. So it seemed to be a gold standard for cleaning efficiency, but also softness at the same time. And obviously then we kind of said, well, tell us about toilet roll and how. And they were like, well, that's completely different. And we said, well, why? And they said, well, look at it, it's entirely flat. And they said, it's got a nice decoration on it, but it's not actually doing anything. It's not. So there was a huge technical insight to take back to Kimberly Clark and the Andrex team, which was around not just three dimensional texture for the sake of it, but actually three dimensional texture that can clean more effectively while also being soft at the same time. So that was the meeting of the mentor. So chapter one in the story was all around kind of having the only way to be able to get a clean result today was either through repeated wiping, which can be irritating over time, and then the root cause of that obviously is the two dimensional nature of the toilet roll surface. Chapter three, the meeting of the mentor talks about the three dimensional nature of this new toilet tissue. And then the happy ever after is a clean result in less wiping that is soft. We know from Kimberly Clark's results in market and what they've been able to share with us was their best testing concept ever, continues to be actually six years later, and their best ever testing prototype. So it blew internal benchmarks, external benchmarks. But your point, Chad, around kind of storytelling, obviously Kimberly Clark and any big paper manufacturer will tell you that the capital required on some of the production systems to make these products is significant. And so having a story and a narrative where people got it immediately and the gold standard of the microfiber cloth and people, it actually was able to credential all of the change Management that was required, that obviously would have been not cheap, we don't know how much, but a significant investment. And so the storytelling was able to create a sense of. Of momentum through the organization as well. I suspect so. And I think it's a story that people could easily relate to, including the ones working on and tooling up the new manufacturing line. Right. And now I'm kind of intrigued to go see if I can find this Kimberly Clark toilet paper to have a better cleaning experience myself. So when it comes to your chapter four about the happily ever after. Right. Once you experience some products, it's like, I'm not going back. So I'm not going back. It might be one of them too. Yeah, that's great. Good story. I think we've done a good job of highlighting a lot of the things that should show up in an innovation experience. Right. With that deep empathy for the customer. Your chapters, I love them. Right. The simplicity. Four steps are a lot easier to grasp than 12. Really understanding the root cause of the problem and then looking at what the possible solutions are there, the meeting the mentor and maybe a number of solution alternatives and really focusing on the gold standard, like that connection back to the customers, how they describe things and then actually seeing that launched and seeing the benefits to the customer and how they think about that. What are some things that have popped up along the way where you see organizations making mistakes that you've been able to help them with, but maybe some of the repeated big things that you run into. Yeah, I think, I mean, the biggest one is what we've been talking about already is around user centricity. And it sounds very simple, but actually in reality, when you're faced with deadlines and raw material costs are increasing and various different competitors are launching left, right and center, it's very, very easy to get lost, I think, in the noise of what is going on. And so if a competitor is in a really exciting launch, what do you do? Do you stay true to the consumer insight that you've been holding onto, or do you have to suddenly copy and paste for one reason or another and follow it that way? I think the other piece that sometimes as well is that companies can be very category LED or brand or product led rather than user led. So just we always say just because we can doesn't mean we should. So really going back to what is it that the consumer needs? And sometimes it's not a binary either or. Right. It's not that we're saying to clients the technology is wrong, the brand is wrong, it's actually, let's take a beat and understand what the consumer needs. And then what is it that you guys can do? What is the brand asset? What is the technical asset that can be matched with this consumer need? So we're not saying brand technology category wrong consumer. Right. It's about making sure that it's a matchmaking exercise between them. And I think the piece that often gets lost or maybe just drowned out sometimes is just the noise and the pace of the initiatives internally can sometimes drown out the voice of the consumer through nobody's fault. It's just busy, Right? Right. It's just busy. And that's usually the number one thing I hear in organizations is we want to innovate. We're already working 60 hours a week and it's not going to happen. Right. We don't have time for new ideas. We don't have time to talk to the customer. So I like that principle that was instilled at you at P and G, that the customer is the boss, the consumer is the boss. Well, they're the ones who buy the product at the end of the day. So I mean, it's not just there to make everybody feel warm and fuzzy about it. There's a huge commercial benefit to consumers, boss. They're the ones who make the decision. Innovation is about creating value for someone. Right. And that's for our customer, our consumer. So if we're not doing that, what are we doing? That's pretty important. So a lot of these concepts we've put together in a new book, Untapping Innovation, tell us a little bit about that and what readers could expect from it. Yeah. So one of the things we found over the years is that there's certain tools within our toolkit, effectively that we keep coming back to and that add enormous value when we're helping clients to either invent a new product or carve a narrative or a story framework for it. And so those eight kind of cornerstone tools, we developed a training course three or four years ago that we call the Innovation Gym to train people on how to use the tools. And now the book is the distillation of each of those tools and the training into a book format. So there's eight tools within the book. Some of them are very industry accepted tools, things like user journey maps, concept development. But we felt it was remiss not to include them. And obviously we've picked up some hints and tips in our way of doing that over the years we've included that. But there's some cornerstone tools that are proprietary to us and to how we work from an innovation perspective. One of them we call an ideal product model, which is basically the idea of building a blueprint. When an architect or a builder is working in a house, it's using that same exact metaphor for building a product. And we start at the very, very top of the blueprint with consumer jobs to be done. So what are the functional jobs? What are the emotional jobs? Where does the consumer need help? That then cascades into the next layer that we call the sensory experience or the attributes. So those are the adjectives, what does the product need to smell like, look like, taste, taste like if it's a food, sound like, if it's some packaging, there may be some haptics required, etc. So at the top, those two layers, the jobs and the attributes, are what goes on in the consumer's world. So what are they looking for? Help? And how will they know that they're getting that help? So what are the signals when they're using it? The next two layers really belong to R and D. And so those, the layer that sits below the adjectives or the attributes are what we call the technical mechanism. So what are the ingredients that we start to put into the product or the packaging components that deliver on the sensory experience that do those jobs? So you're kind of cascading up. And then below the mechanisms are what we call the measures. So those might be clinical measures, consumer measures, a whole range of qualitative, quantitative, even technical measures that prove and give the organization confidence that we're actually delivering on the experience. And typically what will happen, as we all know, is that R and D kind of lives in the mechanism level. But every mechanism has to trace its way back up to an attribute or a job to be done. And if it can't, obviously that from a sustainability, from a cost of goods point of view should be stripped out. So it allows us to kind of really blueprint the technology, but it becomes quite a divergent process. So the other tool that we use, and we've borrowed from you guys in the world of software for this is the minimum viable product. So how do we build the prototype then afterwards? And how do we build a hierarchy of core hygiene factors for the category to the must haves, up to what we call the delightful differentiators. Because we're saying even in an mvp, there has to be a couple of delightful differentiators in there that give it an edge. And so what we do is we end up kind of building a hierarchy. So you have those Two tools working together. You have your ideal product model blueprint and your mvp, which then starts to extract what we can start building quickly. And then in the other part of the model, the other two proprietary tools, one we call the technical mode of action, which is all about kind of fishboning root cause analysis around, kind of looking at current alternatives today and why they're deficient, and then building up a case for the new mode of action to come through. And we visualize that on a cog because it's almost like looking on the inside of kind of the mechanism of what's going on. And that's really where R and D shines. Interpretation, interrogation, projection of what the technology can do. So once we've defined the technical mode of action, then that can inspire the narrative development and pieces together the user understanding with how the product can uniquely address those needs. As we've covered already, having that narrative then fuels breakthrough concept development. And we've touched on the fact that communication in market used to be very much around the 32nd or 45 second, even pieces of TV copy. And in the days of TikTok and social media, influencers are so hungry for so much more than just 30 seconds of information. So if we really understand our technology mode of action, we've developed a great story. Then developing claims and demos off the back of that and a whole wide variety of claims and demos becomes so much easier than just with the concept headlines. So that kind of completes the go to market. We liken everything kind of around a cycle, so we have the consumer sitting on one side of the cycle and the product sitting on the other. So we have four tools that sit at the top, which is all about user understanding and creating the product. And then we have four tools that sit on the bottom, which is all about taking that product back to market and so that the consumer can really clearly understand why you've developed it and why it's better. Excellent. I love a book that presents practical tools for us as innovation practitioners, as product people. And this is one I am anxious to add to my bookshelf as well to learn more about the tools that that your years of experience have uncovered here are really practical and useful for us. So thanks for going through all those with us. We do like an innovation quote around here. I'm going to ask you for one in just a moment. Gave you a heads up that we would be doing that first. Just for anyone listening that does want to explore product management in a deeper level. I do create a couple systems for that. One is called the Rapid Product Mastery Experience. The RPM Experience, this is connecting to a certification that I did back in 2006 from the PDMA, the product development Management Association. I just found their body of knowledge so very useful to me and it helped my career. And others have found it really useful as well. And so I'm trying to pass that on to others now to learn about those concepts. It gets updated every few years and the RPM Experience is a great way to get your hands around it. You can simply find out more about that@productmasterynow.com we do love an innovation quote. Dieter, what do you have for us? Well, it's not actually from what I would call a typical source of innovation, actually. I'm a huge fan of James Clear's Atomic Habits and I love his quote, which is, you don't rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems. And I think when it comes to innovation work, the tools that we systemically use have gotten us the results that we've got. The issue is that they're not used systemically within organizations and there's a lot of what we would deem kind of busy innovation work without actually having the systems in place to really interrogate what's going on with consumers, really interrogate the problem before then jumping to the solution. So I guess our wish is that some of these tools make that R and D work a lot easier for people. Yeah, absolutely. And I appreciate you making the tools available for us. What is the best way for listeners to find out more about the work your company does and also to find out about your book? Yeah, so most frequently updated would be our LinkedIn so you can follow the company Untapped Innovation on LinkedIn or any of the three co founders and authors of the book. We all post regularly and then obviously our company webpage, which is untappedinnovation.com okay, and if I put a link to Amazon for the book, does that work? Yes, it should. It's slightly different from market to market. So I think there's an Amazon link for the UK that's different to the us, that's different to Europe, but I can send all three to you afterwards so you have those. Okay, that sounds great. I'm so glad we could talk today. Thanks for all the information. And we get to benefit from your years of experience helping these other organizations as well, not just at P and G. And now we have a collection of tools that have been time tested that you really find make a difference. I appreciate you making that available for us as well. My pleasure. Thank you for having us and listeners. If you do want to find the written notes of everything that we discuss, Simply go to productmasterynow.com 597 as always, keep innovating. Thank you for listening to Product Mastery now, where product leaders and managers gain Product Mastery through practical knowledge, influence and confidence. By listening, you are becoming a product Master, creating products customers love. Find additional resources@productmasterynow.com keep innovating.