607: Transferring product skills from Microsoft to the backcountry - with Stefanie Whittington

Speaker A: Can you become a better product professional by changing industries? I've talked with several who have and there are many benefits but you need to navigate it well. Our guest Stephanie Winnington went from marketing at Microsoft to leading a physical product that has to survive 100,000 miles or more of trails, extreme heat and cold, and also the honest feedback of people who enjoy the outback and backcountry areas. What does a move like that teach you about product management and how does it make your product actually better and maybe make you a better product professional? Stephanie will help us answer that. She is a senior Product Manager at Winnebago where she leads the development of arca, the company's newest rv, a very cool looking off grid adventure truck built for people who want to get far off the map and stay there. She has earned an MBA and her background runs through a number of product related leadership roles. Spending a lot of time in Silicon Valley, uh, and startups which were later acquired by companies that we know including Microsoft. And now at Winnebago, one of the most recognized names in RVs. Fascinating story of moving from software sort of products now into physical hardware products. If you're listening to our discussion and would rather watch it on video, simply go to our YouTube channel. Search for product mastery now on YouTube. We'll jump in right after this.

Speaker B: 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, custom love, enhance your influence and elevate your career. Welcome to Product Mastery now hosted by Dr. Chad McAllister, Product Management professor, practitioner and your guide.

Speaker A: Stephanie, thank you so much for being with us.

Speaker C: Thanks Chad for having me.

Speaker A: So I'm really excited to hear more about your journey and moving from one domain into, from software right into hardware. But first give us a little bit of sense of, of the background in marketing and into product management. And I've talked with people who have done a similar shift and sometimes they see clearer connections and sometimes trying to navigate it, they did not see them going on. Right. How did that change work for you?

Speaker C: Yeah, so I have, I would say an interesting path in my career in general. Even when I went into my undergrad, my undergrad was in psychology and so I focused a lot on obviously how the human brain works, what resonates with us. And a lot of that translated really effectively into starting a career in marketing. I built most of my career in startups. So small companies that were intending Obviously to grow. Spent a lot of time bringing those products to market, working on how we did our entire go to market strategy from a marketing standpoint, from any of our partner relations standpoints, running media things along those lines. Right. But really identifying the best fit and the best way to bring these products to customers in the market. So that way it resonated and the companies could grow from there. I actually spent quite a bit of time as a full time rver. So I lived the true digital nomad life working in marketing from the RV on the road, traveling around, and that sort of led me into this really high empathy state for this type of consumer in this consumer segment. And just so happened to see an opportunity that opened at Winnebago where they were looking for a person to come in and run the product management M team for a handful of the products in the portfolio. And the fit felt perfect. I had a lot of that consumer understanding because I was one, still am one, and bringing a lot of the skills that I had where I came from. These companies that were bootstrapped, they were quick pivot organizations, they were really taking what they learned and translating that into new strategies or new ways to go to market or new ways to, to increase revenue and taking a lot of that skillset, translating that into a place where I have a strong consumer empathy and understanding. And all of a sudden now here we are in a space where I have the privilege of getting to lead the design team that works on some of the coolest products that I think we can put out in the market. These are platforms that people spend tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of dollars on. A lot of times this is the second largest purchase that they make in their life. And so it really is a unique, incredible opportunity to bring something that quite literally makes dreams come true for people.

Speaker A: That's really good. When you say you spent quite a bit of time as a Digital Nomad in RVs, how much time was that? I'm curious about the background.

Speaker C: Yeah, so right after my husband and I got married, we decided that instead of trying to go and buy a house, we would buy an RV instead. So our first home was a 1994 Winnebago Brave. And we spent almost two years in that as our full time home traveling state to state, we'd go and we'd stay somewhere for a week or two weeks. And our rule of thumb was when we all of a sudden didn't need to use Google Maps anymore to get around town, that it was time to go to the next spot. So we'd move to the next spot, find somewhere, work for the next week, two weeks, go hiking after work, on the weekends, go exploring. And we did that for our first two years of marriage, which was a pretty unique way to spend that time.

Speaker A: Yes, it is. Good break in honeymoon period there, right?

Speaker C: Exactly.

Speaker A: Certainly let's live in a small, confined space together and travel the U.S. so that's great. As uh, some listeners will know, this podcast got started from taking a trek with my wife and two kids back in 2014. Well, 13 and 14. And we were out only for a year and two weeks. So you have us beat. But that happened to be in a 2010 Winnebago Adventurer, which is, uh, a, uh, class A motorhome that we finally called Rocky. Rocky was its nickname. So, um, good experiences. You talk about having that empathy for the customer. And this is my understanding of the RV industry, having had a few RVs and always trying to stay up on this because I just enjoy it so much. A lot of RV manufacturers simply copy products from someone else. And as I've talked to insiders, there's not a lot of people actually using RVs, which is very disappointing to me. And it's great to see Winnebago having product managers that are actually out experiencing what the lifestyle is like and bringing that into things. Let's dive a little bit deeper into that. I'm curious what has helped you as an enthusiast of the lifestyle. Right. And maybe wanting to get off grid, some country work. And what may have hindered you? Right. Because as product people, sometimes when we're building the product to scratch our own itch, we end up not building the thing that everyone actually wants. Right. It's the thing that we want and not others. How has that, uh, experience helped you?

Speaker C: It's a really interesting dichotomy. Right. When you are out in the field and you are doing the activities that you want to do, whether that be camping, going hiking, et cetera, and making sure that you can translate that into a broad set of customer needs. Correct. Not just your own needs. Right. And I'm a little bit of a unique case because most of the time individuals that are purchasing RVs, especially ones in the Winnebago portfolio, are typically pre retirement or in that retirement age. They have a lot of disposable income. I am in my prime of working conditions. I've got two young children. And so when I'm out on the road, my needs set, uh, is different than somebody who is likely going to ultimately purchase this product. And so Having that sort of cross section between, yes, how I use a product and how our customers will ultimately use these products is actually a really key piece of it. So, of course, I mean, I love this lifestyle. I want to be out on the road as often as I can. I love traveling. I'm, um, often at owner's rallies and industry events. I'm out for even just my own vacations because it's something that I love to do and I love to give that experience to my family as well. But to balance that out, I regularly talk to customers, whether it's somebody I run into in a campground or run into at a gas station, run into at an owner's rally while I'm out at these events. Having those conversations with that customer is incomparable to anything else. There's not a forum that you can read all day long. There's no Facebook group that replicates what you actually learn when you are talking to a customer. And that could be anything from understanding what their last trip looked like. Where did you go? What did you do? What were things that were important to you? Where were you camping? Like, how did you use your RV along the way to also sitting there and saying, show me how you cook a meal and seeing how they're using the galley cabinets, or how they're using the stovetop, or how they're storing the things inside of their actual motorhome and having that, like, tangible experience alongside of them as they're doing those activities. Because you can always assume how somebody does something until you actually actively see them using the product that you're designing for and that you're building and recognizing and seeing those patterns and saying, oh, my goodness. Well, how. I always thought that you'd put food right here. Like, why did you not put. Put food right here? Oh, well, it's because this is actually closer to the bedroom area. So I want to have all my jackets there or I want to have all my backup clothes there. So I'm using this space way over here for food. Well, we didn't design that originally like that. And so learning those pieces, like, as you're tangibly talking to customers, seeing them in the real world, seeing them in the field, like, there is just nothing that can replicate that. No amount of demoing on a sales lot is ever going to show you how somebody actually uses that product. And that is how, like, when we talk about how much copying happens in this industry, like, when we think about Winnebago and the way that we pride ourselves is that we don't Copy. We don't drive in a competitor's unit into our warehouse and say let's reverse engineer it. We're saying we start with the customer need state first. And having that really outlined and understood and identified, that translates into our design. Not just because somebody else is doing it right.

Speaker A: It's a big distinction because unfortunately most of the industry is copying and just trying to figure out the cost effective way to make things. And Winnebago is also very vertically integrated that they make a lot of their own parts internally, water tanks, upholstery stuff that others buy. And so it's a different sort of experience. Speaking of someone who owned a couple, Winnipeg goes a long ways here. The I do want to dive into the empathy aspect for the customer more. But before I lose the track, talking about just your experience, right, from startups and software space and tech space and now onto physical product that leverages your love of the outdoors and being a Ventura yourself, what was it like for you navigating that change of industry? Right, that change of domain? There's been some great people we've interviewed who have done that as product people. One of my favorite one is Ben Britton who, who was at Pepsi doing. He's a PhD food chemist guy and he goes to snap on tools to lead innovation for them and knows nothing about metallurgy. Right. That are actually tools, but he knew the process. What did you find that helped you move into physical and was that challenging, easy? What advice do you have for people trying to make a change like that?

Speaker C: Yeah, certainly challenging. Obviously going from the software world to uh, a physical goods manufacturing space, it is a night and day difference. Right. Where you're actually building your product is different. The fact that you're delivering something that doesn't just have uh, a push update that you can make overnight. Making a change to like a physical motorhome can take months or sometimes years depending on how long or how large the change is. And so there is a lot of learning curve with that, especially because you're also moving into a space different than the software startup world where you, you have a core team of developers. Now all of a sudden I have a core team of engineers. You could almost have some akin in the mindset there. But now all of a sudden I also have to translate that to humans that are gonna physically build a product. And so that shift from the design element into physical translation of the manufacturing side. And you mentioned our vertical integrations that we have at Winnebago. That is. Yes, we build a lot of our Cabinets ourselves. We have an entire fiberglass shop. We do. We've got an entire model shop on site as well. That act lot of our R and D arm where they can do mock ups for us in plywood. And now all of a sudden you're having to take all of this ideation and move it into the physical space. Uh, it's not a small learning curve. I've been at Winnebago now for four years and I still say that I learn something new every single day. Whether that be from the process standpoint or the manufacturing standpoint or why we can't use a material because it doesn't do this well or to prefer something else because it performs better when you're 10 years down the line or 15 years down the line. Whereas yeah, you just, you don't have that same sort of consideration set when you're building a software, but you have an entirely different set of requirements on the software side as well. Right. So it definitely is two mentalities and it takes, is actively taking a learning curve. Right. To get good at. And I think there's people that have spent 30 years at Winnebago that would say they're still learning things as they're going through this process too, Right?

Speaker A: Yeah, no doubt. Yeah. So it sounds like key distinctions there. Obviously physical product, you have manufacturing now to think about and working with with the operations team there and getting tooled up. Right. For whatever's gonna be made. And the materials, the material aspect is important especially in the RV industry because like you said, you kind of, if you buy one of these expensive things, you want it running 10 years later, if you're still RVing and the materials need to last and trying something new is very risky because you don't know how it's gonna hold up. And so the whole material aspect, pretty key to help you with this. What was it? Uh, just leaning on others inside the company to guide the way some. Did you find other resources useful?

Speaker C: Uh, we have a fantastic team of individuals at Winnebago. So I will just start with that. Team members, like I said, who have worked there for decades that have legacy knowledge of things they've tried and things they've learned over time. And they are just an absolute wealth of knowledge on how to continue to do things better in the future. So yes, team members within the verticals, team members within our operations team, team members within our uh, development teams as well as when we talk about like a cross functional approach from a product management standpoint, that certainly rings true in the winnebago world in any sort of physical manufacturing. Right. Because you have so many different cross functional teammates that you have to lean on. Supply chain and vertical manufacturing, finance, compliance, safety regulations, customer support and customer service. It just is unbelievable the number of people that it needs in order to make these physical products really come to life.

Speaker A: Mhm. So when you were asked in the interview, uh, when you were applying for this position at Winnebago, I'm sure there was some questions about, well, how are you going to catch up on the domain knowledge? Maybe you understand a lot about developing products and helping products grow in the marketplace, but this is very different. What story did you craft to convince them that you were the right pick for this?

Speaker C: Oh man. Well, one thing I mentioned, I live in Colorado, so I work remote for Winnebago. When I first started with them, as part of my convincing that I was the right fit for this is I moved to Iowa for the summer and I got to spend my time. I lived in a class A Forza down by the river, by the Winnebago river in Forest City, Iowa and spent the whole summer there so I could get fully ingrained in the process. And that entailed spending time in each of our vertical areas, spending time with manufacturing individuals, spending time down on our line build that we have and just getting a grasp and an understanding of what it means, what it looks like, how are we building all of these things? And I had a really fantastic product leader that brought me into the organization who, uh, literally spent decades at Winnebago, Just retired only a few years ago and retired into it. Winnebago Echo. And so spends his time out on the road now and through that time just capturing as much as I could of historical knowledge. And that just means asking a lot of questions and being okay to like play the new person card and not feel shame or embarrassed because you don't know an answer to something. I think most people feel like they have to step into a role with the assumption that they already know everything, that they're bringing that knowledge to the table. And it's also okay to show up to the table and say, hey, I've never experienced that before. Tell me what that means to you. Tell me your experience. Tell me what you go through when you're doing this process. Tell me what that acronym means. Explain to me how you go from A to Z through this. And being okay in sort of that moment of vulnerability as well is really critical and important and I think makes you not just a big better product leader. But also just a more well rounded member of the team too. If you can say like, oh, I understand where you're coming from, when you tell me I can't do this, it's not because you're telling me no, it's because you have all these constraints. Because you've told me about the constraints that you have.

Speaker A: Right? Yeah. Really good. So you were on site learning some of the constraints involved learning about the manufacturing process and building some of that gap. Uh, often when I'm asked about this question about changing industries and the like, what's the value of the domain experience? I think if it's a role that requires you to take an existing product and make it much better, the deep domain knowledge is helpful. If it's a role where the company is trying to do something new, being the outsider is actually really beneficial because you don't make the same assumptions that all the insiders have been making. And you can actually, I think, have better empathy for the customer because you're not assuming what everyone else has already assumed. Back to the empathy aspect of that. Having deep empathy for the customer, learning what they need in a adventure vehicle like this or other RVs as well. I had come across that, I think you were taking the ARCA as a unbranded product so people wouldn't know it was a Winnebago out to places like RV type shows to get feedback. Can you tell us a little bit just about why you did that, uh, and what was involved?

Speaker C: Yeah. So, I mean, the ARCA is an interesting introduction for Winnebago as a whole. Right. It's a path that I think most people would assume that Winnebago would not go down because it really is a little bit of new territory for us. I think that we've established that there is this consumer that wants to be in backcountry, wants to have the freedom, wants to have the capabilities to go wherever they want to go. But this is certainly a step into a space that is primarily dominated with small boutique builds that are really high priced, usually starting at half a million dollars and go up from there. And so it really is not highly accessible for a broad consumer like Winnebago needs to be able to attract. Right. Like we look for volume, um, when we build our products. So in that development cycle, really making sure that we were hitting the right points was critical. Understanding what the base needs set and expectations of this consumer was going to be was really key for us to hit a price point that was going to become something that would be a Broad market play. So we launched the ARCA in May of this year. A, ah, year before that, we had done what we called a mule build. It's basically a really rough prototype version of the product. It still drives, it still operates, it has all the functionality in it, but it doesn't necessarily have the styling elements perfected, it doesn't have the body shape perfected, anything along those lines. It's really there for functional testing. And we built this up and it gave us a chance to learn a lot of lessons because we engineered so so many different new processes into this build. So it gave us a chance to vet a lot of that stuff on the front end, learn some of those lessons really early on, get some of the failure points out of the way so we could progress on the product itself. But as a piece of that, it also meant taking it out into the field. And so we built up this prototype build and I took it out to Overland Expo west, which is in Flagstaff, Arizona, and one of Overland Expo's larger events, and camped it in the campground alongside of all of these people that I felt like were our target customer, target demographic, parked it in the middle of them. Um, of course, everything was unmarked. We had, I think, one spot on it that had a Winnebago W and it was covered. So it was entirely undescript. The only thing that you could ever notice was the fact that I had an Iowa license plate on it, which I took off for the show anyways. And it was really cool because you'd have people that would walk by and they'd be like, oh, that's a really cool build. And I'd be like, oh yeah, thanks. Do you want to come in and look at it? And I would walk people through this and I would get their perspective on the use of the space, I'd get their perspective on the battery capacity that we had and I'd get their perspective on, do you like this? Don't you like this? What would you change, right? And sort of used it under the guise of saying, oh yeah, some of our friends of ours built this. And I'm talking about my friends back in Forest that built this, but some of our friends built this and they're letting us use it. What would you do different? And after that, first of all, I've got all that customer feedback now. I've got all that insight, I've got the perspective, I've got the unfiltered thoughts of the actual build itself. Notwithstanding that, I've also spent years capturing the need state in order to get to that point from these customers. But then after that I also took it out and tested it and spent hundreds of miles on dirt taking it through different terrain trying to figure out how it performed, what worked, what didn't work, what was going to break on it. And I definitely broke some things on it, which is exactly what it needed to do and ended up having to flatbed it back to Iowa because I'd found failure points, figured out what was going to not work on it, sent it back to engineering and engineering re engineered and then we would do more testing on it. We've got this really cool shaker table that's in Forest City, Iowa and it simulates 100,000 miles of road wear and tear and there's different like levels that you can set it at. And so we've got arca's on the shaker table like figuring out what's going to break, what's going to come apart and then re engineering and re engineering and making it better and having all those iterations of it. What that's what ended up coming to fruition and what we ended up building. So to your original question there, it's such a multi step approach and spending time with customers is first of all invaluable. It is so critically key to understanding what's going to work and what's not going to work. But being willing to invest that time and be out using the product the way that your customer thinks they're going to use the product and figuring out what they're going to learn so that way you learn it before they do. First of all, I think that's unique for Winnebago. And second of all, I think that's what makes our products that much more reliable and thought through.

Speaker A: Yeah, certainly all the testing to know what breaks very important for customers. But the thoughtfulness of having things in the right place like every RV I've had, I've made so many modifications to and it seems like almost everyone does that. Like why can't they just put in the fan in the first place that I want. Right. A decent fancy little things. Did something come out that comes to mind of like a key learning from that interactions with customers at Overland as you're showing them around your, your extra special RV that stands out to you where you went oh did think about that one.

Speaker C: Yeah. Gosh, let's see. There were a lot, there were certainly a lot that came out of it. One that I can think of off the top of my head here as well was the way that we did our entry step. The way that you actually access the truck itself, it's relatively high up off the ground. And that's for a couple reasons. Obviously you've got a lot of ground clearance with that. Like you don't want things that are riding low to the ground. We put a lot of our like tank systems down low so that way your center of gravity is mitigated. Like there's a lot of reasons for that. But the way that we had originally designed our access in there were these like massive super cumbersome steps that get into the truck that you literally have to like pick up and move and store and all this stuff. And one thing that came out of that was like the access into the truck because that's something that you're going to do so many times throughout the day. You're going to use it, you're going to store them, you're going to need to be able to move. You don't want it to be a lot of work. You need it to be light and easy. And so when we did the redesign on it, we made these really nice, easy leverage points, slide in steps that store right underneath the entry door. They're at a perfect height where they'll literally auto level depending on the terrain that you're on. And that was something that came out of it where you're like, this is something that someone is going to do multiple times a day and it has to just work and it has to be easy and it has to be convenient. Right. And so like those little things where when you're just, you just have a prototype parked in a warehouse and the steps are out all day every single day, like nobody's ever messing with them. And so you don't learn that the same way when it's so two dimensional like that. And so having that customer lens all of a sudden really can change the way that you think about how something will be used. Because it might not be the way that you think it's going to be used.

Speaker A: Right, exactly. Right, yeah. And that goes back to we're designing for a larger market, even that one on one customer research multiple times, right. You talk to 10 or 20 people, you start hearing what the unmet uh m needs are, that really need to get solved for and how to make changes really valuable. When we're developing a software product, there's all kinds of different stakeholders involved and we have our own list of features that we have reason to believe that create value for the customer. And we can't do everything and Some of that involves having to say no to stakeholders that want certain things. And I don't know if that showed up in now your experience with building this physical venture truck, having to manage different desires of stakeholders. What some people thought might we really might need in this, I would think because this is a new entry for Winnebago, it gets a lot of attention. And a lot of people had some probably firm opinions about what we should and should not do. How. Let's learn from your experience. How do we go about negotiating that and managing that, those preferences among stakeholders?

Speaker C: Yeah, it's wild when you start getting all of the opinions in a room. What sort of comes out of those conversations? Certainly I think this has been a product that has exemplified opinions probably more than any other product even that I've brought to market so far with Winnebago. But even just in my past history as well. And like I mentioned, we did a lot of new build styles with this, whether it be new chassis builds, new ways that we mount the actual house builds to that chassis, to different ways that we engineered the interior and the modularity approaches we took and some of the ruggedized expectations that we had out of it. So there were so many requirements that we had set up. And so as a part of kind of navigating those opinions that came out, we had a pretty clear set of product requirements. We had a fully built plan of what needed to be delivered in the product. We also had a full set of use cases and expected challenges that our customers were going to run into. And so each step along the way, when we had conflicts or rumbles or opinions that we were working through, for the most part, everything pointed back to, well, does this fulfill the use case that the customer is trying to do? If the answer is yes, it fulfills it. Okay, great, let's put that into place. If it was, well, we need to make a pivot from a manufacturing strategy, for example, but now all of a sudden, we're deviating from an expectation that this customer will have. We're deviating from a use case requirement. Well, that's not worth it anymore. We can find cost reduction opportunities, for example, but just because we're reducing a performance, reducing a feature, that doesn't mean that's going to meet the customer expectation and customer needs. So, I mean, don't get me wrong, it's by no means perfect. We put tens of thousands of pieces that go into motorhomes. Those are all opportunities for conflict or opportunities for opinions to show up in there. We set up, uh, a Brand new manufacturing area alongside this process. So that meant all new methods for manufacturing, it meant new processes that we had to set up, it meant new supply chain requirements. All of those are opportunities for opinions. And so I think the root of it really goes back to if I'm going to spend $300,000 on a truck, am I going to be okay with this decision that we're about to make? Does this still make my use case come to life? Mhm. The answer is yes. Okay, the answer is no then it's not something worth compromising on.

Speaker A: Right. Okay. So grounding it back to the use cases for your ideal customer through your customer research, market research, how they will be using the product that, that was really the North Star for guiding decisions when it comes to. So as you said, this is the 300,000 ish version of a offline venture truck and things in the market are well north of 500,000. But that also suggests there's play in between. And I'm sure there were things that you and others said, well we could just do this, this would delight customers. And knowing when to stop is kind of important, right? Like you can always add more. We all have this problem knowing when to stop. And you're shipping a physical product that needs to have an actual stop because like you said, we can't do software updates afterwards. What helped you make those decisions about things to leave out and make sure we got to done so that we can manufacture this?

Speaker C: Yeah, we had an actual pillar in the project itself and it was everything you need and nothing you don't. And so in that mentality it pointed back in every decision that we were making, every feature that we could add to it. We made sure that we had everything that you need to get out in the backcountry to do it effectively, to have self recovery options if you need to get yourself out of a spot, whatever that looks like, without adding things that were extraneous, whether that be over the top fit and finish, like luxury items, things like that, we really kept things like chassis modifications to a minimum because those are also things that in this, this customer set. There's a lot of pride in making these products personalized and modifying them to fit your use case, to fit your hobbies, to fit your identity, to fit your needs, those sorts of things. And there's a lot of like enjoyment in that for a lot of these consumers too where like they don't necessarily want me to make every decision for them, they want me to get them 80% of the way there and then they're do the other 20% however they want to do it. So that made a lot of the decisions easy. We kind of went like, is this easy to modify aftermarket? Is this easy for somebody to go and shop that for a Ram truck afterwards? If the answer was yes on that, we go, all right, well, is this sufficient? Does this hit the use case? Yes, it hits the use case. Okay, then it's probably not something that we need to spend the dollars on. If a customer wants it, then they get that freedom to go and spend those dollars and to turn it into whatever they want. So it was really, uh, like, a practice in maybe not even thinking about, like, adding all of the feature set, but a practice in saying, like, what is the right amount to just get you off the dealer lot and into the backcountry that same day and feel like you can drive off the lot and do everything that you want to do, but everything else on top of that is gravy that you can go and play around with and make those mods and make those adjustments and make those changes to the truck as you want to. And then we preserve the fun, that fun part of it too. Right? Like, someone wants to spend the time, like, making the truck their own and, like, making those personalizations and modifications and giving them that chance to do it. That really kind of helped us keep a lot of things in check and to be okay with saying no to some features because, yeah, it's not the right place to spend dollars.

Speaker A: Right. I love that. So good guidance on use cases to guide decisions. And also this pillar, everything you need and nothing you don't, to help us make decisions about what goes in and what does not go out. And so good advice for product managers to be thinking about having a framework. Right. For decision making like this, just for fun. Question, where was the place that you most enjoyed taking the arca?

Speaker C: Mmm, let's see. I've spent a lot of time in Utah with it, which I think is everybody's, you know, dream playground with a vehicle like that. So spend a lot of time, like,

Speaker A: up around Moab Arches. Those are. Yep.

Speaker C: All in Southern Utah, Escalante area. There's a lot of fun backcountry opportunities there. I'm obviously in Colorado, so literally anywhere in Colorado is fabulous.

Speaker A: There's good options.

Speaker C: M. There's a lot of good options in Colorado. So spending time by the river, spending time out in the desert, spending time just having wide open vistas. I think one of my favorite parking spots that I've ever found actually was along the Beartooth Mountain highway in it's right along southern Montana, northern Wyoming, up there and found a backcountry spot that quite literally was right next to this small little lake and just had vistas of the whole Beartooth Range right there. And just the places that you get to find because you have the ability to access it just opens up a whole new world of things that become your own unique memories.

Speaker A: Yep, it's a great lifestyle. So like the opportunity to get out and go camping and enjoy time with the family. So really good information. We also love a innovation quote and I like getting one of those before you share one with us. Just as a reminder, everyone listening and if you do want to go deeper in your product management knowledge, there's a professional association called PD May, the Product Development Management association, and they have been curating knowledge for product innovators, product managers now, for 50 years and also researching the space deeply for us. And they have a knowledge base to help us. And I provide a training system to also help you learn that called the RPM M experience, the Rapid Product Mastery Experience. If you want to check it out, simply go to the website, same name as the podcast here, productmasterynow.com and you'll find information on the RPM um, experience to help you become a better product professional yourself. What is an innovation quote you have for us, Stephanie, and just share a little bit about what it means to you. Sure.

Speaker C: So the one that I picked for today was not all those who wander are lost. And it's a quote actually out of the Lord of the Rings franchise. But what's interesting about it is while it relates to this idea of, yes, get out and explore and everything, that kind of comes along with the freedom aspect. I think one thing that's really interesting about it as product management professionals is one of the ways that we get to innovation is through that wander phase where we're seeing where there's opportunity and we're seeing where the adventure could be or where the next great thing could be. And we wander there with intentionality and we can always find ourselves kind of in these places where we're going. Ha, uh, I got there and I think that it's something to remember that it's okay to be in that innovation. It's okay to be in that wander space, but to do it with intentionality and to find the passion in that I think is really critical. And I think that quote kind of emulates that.

Speaker A: I like that quote. Absolutely. We are good, uh, at wandering and learning along the way, right? To, uh, reach the objectives that we have. Fantastic. Very enjoyable conversation. How can people find out more about you and more about the ARCA and any resources you want to share?

Speaker C: Yes, you can always learn more about the ARCA if you go to Winnebago's website winnebago.com youm can also follow us across social media. You can find myself on LinkedIn as well for anybody who wants to connect. Otherwise you, uh, will probably find me out in the field, hopefully camping where no one else can find me.

Speaker A: So it might be hard to find you out in the field, but you enjoy that. That's fantastic. And anyone else that wants to enjoy that too. It sounds like we should check out the arca. It does look like a impressive vehicle. Thank you for sharing the insights, moving between industries, as a product person and now what it's like to be involved in physical products. And for listeners. If you want to find the written version of everything we just talked about, including those links, Simply go to productmasterynow.com 607 as always, keep innovating.

Speaker C: 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.