How Zillow applied customer-centric principles in development of a B2B data product
Presenters: Steve Hansen, Partner and President, Phase 5 US; Gabriel Renteria, Sr. Insights Manager, Zillow Group

Having revolutionized how consumers experience the housing market, Zillow has accumulated a trove of data of immense detail and potential value to many different players in the housing industry. Yet like a scientist who discovers a new material, the company must connect the dots between the innovation and its actual value to specific people in specific circumstances.

Gabriel Renteria and Steve Hansen will present a case study on how a creative combination of Jobs-To-Be-Done and Workflow Mapping approaches enabled the company to avoid the “just-because-we-have-technology” product trap. Instead of launching a kitchen sink product that might potentially undervalue the data, the JTBD/WM approach identified customer needs at critical points in the end user’s process and enabled the company to focus product development and maximize potential revenue.

Using NDP in Government: Developing Programs for Thailand 4.0
Presenter: Phyllis Leah Speser, Senior Advisor to the President, King Mongkut's University of Technology Thonburi

While we normally think of NDP as an industrial phenomenon, NDP also occurs in government. The Thai Government is in the process of developing a new economy called Thailand 4.0 which requires, in the language of NPD, both disruptive and architectural innovation. Implementing Thailand 4.0 calls for developing a "balanced portfolio" of programs with an emphasis on disruptive and architectural innovation. As a senior consultant to the Thai Government, Speser will discuss how she is using a combined Agile/Stage Gate NDP process to help the Thais analyze the current innovation ecosystem and development of a new one. The session will conclude with some general observations on NDP applied to governmental challenges.

Machine Learning: When Primary Research Becomes Secondary
Presenters: Gerry Katz, Vice Chairman, Applied Marketing Science, Inc.; Kristyn Corrigan, Principal, Applied Marketing Science, Inc.; Douglas Clark, Product Manager, Douglas Dynamics, Inc.

Machine learning techniques have been widely discussed in the market research community, but so far with only limited practical results. There remain many questions about how to use machine learning techniques and for what applications. However, new research at the MIT Sloan School of Management has now shown that computers can quickly replicate some of the most laborious tasks for human beings at extracting customer needs and insights from a wide variety of textual sources such as reviews, discussion boards, and customer verbatims. This presentation will demonstrate a practical application of Machine Learning for customer needs identification.

Design Thinking in a VUCA World
Presenter: Mark Dziersk, Partner, McKinsey Design

Mark will draw on 16 years of teaching Innovation and Creativity at Northwestern University as well as serving clients at McKinsey Design. The presentation will demonstrate state-of-the-art problem solving techniques for creating disruptive innovation and opportunity. Mark will unpack new methods Design Thinkers are using to grow business, and create future states for Fortune 100 brands. The presentation closes with a top ten list of priorities for Design Thinkers in 2030! In a world consisting of diversely varying consumer groups and products, the proper mindset and methods for creating innovation are needed more than ever. This speech will demonstrate real tools and methods that attendees can walk away and use immediately.

Maybe We Should Be Problem Managers or, What isn’t product management?
Presenter: Steve Johnson, Vice President of products, Pragmatic Institutue

Product Management is one of the most exciting—and most misunderstood—functions in technical organizations. Is it strategic or tactical? Is it a planning role or a support role? Many product professionals are unclear about what is (and isn't) product management. After all, product management spans many activities from business planning to market readiness.

Highlights

• A better metaphor for product manager
• Is the product manager a ""mini-CEO""?
• A simple tool to profile product management activities

In this session, we’ll examine many product activities and artifacts for product strategy, planning, and growth, and introduce a simple tool that you can use in your organization to clarify the roles of product management and others.

Steve Johnson explores the many roles of Product Management in this fun talk focused on why product managers should obsess on problems instead of solutions.

How To Win with Services!
Presenter: Patrick McGowan, Founder & Managing Principal, The Service Design Group

While some aspects of service design and development have matured, firms struggle to produce winning services — services that produce revenue and drive actual business outcomes. In How to Win with Services, The Service Design Group will demonstrate critical tools and techniques necessary to cultivate a pipeline of service innovations; build, test and refine services; and launch and manage a portfolio of winning services. Attendees will learn actionable steps to create services that drive business outcomes and can be monetized as a product.

Envisioning the Intelligent Era - Scenarios for the Digital Future 2028
Presenter: Tom Culver, Senior Innovation Advisor, RTI International - Innovation Advisors Group

The race to develop AI applications and software is on! But what other megatrends and drivers will have major impacts on the technology development of the intelligent era? Based on an exhaustive year-long futures research effort RTI will share the social, ethical, economic and political drivers and trends that will directly shape the future of AI and which product and software developers must understand and anticipate. We will also share three very different visions of where AI and intelligent digital products may be in 2038 so attendees can begin to envision and plan for the future — today! Attendees will be given AI technology constructs, a set of 70 trend/drivers and AI futures scenarios to take back to their company.

Decoding Disruption
Presenter: Isaac Rogers, CEO, 20|20

In a world that is being disrupted every day by new products and services, how does the average consumer perceive disruption and what does that mean for brands who want to gain their business? Isaac Rogers of 20|20 will share the findings and implications from a multi-phase research study exploring disruption. Attendees will learn what consumers expect from brands they work with and how they can ride the ripples of these expectations to drive growth. Attendees will learn a process for creating a disruption plan based on the ripple disruptions that come from large disruptions.

Creating New Flavors Through Open Innovation
Presenters: Alex Byelashov, Vice President Innovations and Brewing Solutions, John I. Haas / Barth Haas Group

As the recognized leader in refining hops to create innovative flavor solutions, Barth Haas Group approaches the market from the minds of the brewers. A key element of this approach is designing innovative hops products that not only solve brewers' issues of efficiency and cost, but also enable them to innovate their own products. Here, we will highlight some successes in product design through our recently-developed hop products — enabling the next revolution in brewing.

Why Digital Transformation Is All About Services
Presenter: Vele Galovski, Vice President Research and Advisory, Technology Services Industry Association (TSIA)

Digital transformation is disrupting traditional OEM business models that were designed to optimize the push of products to customers via large, up-front deals (CapEx). Unfortunately, the core technology asset is commoditizing and technological advancements are enabling customers to pursue new OpEx consumption models without large up-front purchases. New, disruptive business models are forcing product companies to design “as-a-service” offers that are built around achieving specific customer business outcomes.

In this session you will learn:

• How running an annual recurring revenue / “XaaS” business is different than traditional CapEx models and the implications for product / service design.
• How to develop products and services to build consumption models based on shared risk, shared purpose and shared reward.
• How to use outcome engineering to consistently help your customers achieve targeted business outcomes ... and get paid for it.

The PM's Guide to Designing Enterprise Data Products and Decision Support Tools that Matter
Presenter: Brian O'Neill, Founder and Principal, Designing for Analytics

In 2019, Gartner predicted 80%+ of analytics insights won't deliver outcomes through 2022 despite sizable tech investments and previous studies on these failure rates. While machine learning, AI, and advanced analytics remain in the "hype" cycle, data teams still struggle to design engaging, valuable decision support tools that customers love. Why? Solutions are too often data-first and human-second, obfuscating the real problems begging to be solved. Here are some design strategies product managers need to know.

The Gen Z Jam Jar: Is Less Really More when it Comes to Choices?
Presenter: Mary Michael Pontzer, VP, Product, ACT, Inc.

Drawing on the famous Harvard Jam Jar study, this session will highlight Gen Z consumers and the impact of too many choices on their product purchases and product usage behaviors. The session, which will encourage audience participation through Slido, is compelling because it will include case studies and practical tips.

Customers Can (and Should) Transform Your Tomorrow
Presenter: Kevin Budelmann, President, Peopledesign

It’s not news that we’re moving from an industrial economy to an information economy, but the impact is not well understood. In fact, we’re just at the beginning of this change. Older paradigms and ways of working are less effective. Emerging processes offer new patterns for work, teams and tools. While much transformation is powered by new technology, Design Thinking and other human-centered approaches are more important than ever. Leaders decide what problems to solve, and organizations need new priorities. Customer Meaning and Customer Experience are critical for any business to remain vital today, but too often these strategic needs are nobody’s job. Customer Meaning is about staying relevant in the mind of the customer. It’s a question involving your brand, value propositions, company purpose and communications. How do you define your customer? What do you want them to think? Once you’re clear about a perception goal, consider what you need to do differently to fulfill on that promise. Today’s Customer Experience is about physical, digital and personal interactions. A new set of priorities may lead to new teams, tactics and tools. It’s about planning, measuring, learning and adapting to create a coherent experience that delivers on a value proposition. Customers seek meaningful experiences. Products, brands and the companies behind them need to connect the dots.

Final Battle: Empathy Vs. Biases: How to Design with Empathy and Leave Your Biases Behind
Presenter: Alexandra Lung, Consultant Senior Product Manager, Pivotal Labs

Empathy requires us to put aside our learning, culture, knowledge, opinions and worldview purposefully in order to understand other peoples’ experiences of things deeply and meaningfully. But most of the time, empathy is blinded by our own biases. We're trapped in assumptions and in the need to be right and it constantly hurts our view on the world around us and the impact of the products we are building.

What makes a product design great is not simply listening to the user. It is hearing the user with empathy and without biases. And acknowledging and eliminating biases is one of the hardest and most important tasks when designing today; we can all continuously get better at it.

Take part in this interactive session and become more aware of how you ask questions, how you listen and how you interpret the information you hear. Lung will also share a series of stories on how her team improved product design through empathy, and she will go through the traits of an empathic observer and the tools that we can use to gain a deep understanding of the people for whom we are designing.

AI & Deep Web Driven Enterprise Competitive Technology Intelligence: Case Studies
Presenter: Srinivas Achanta, Managing Director; SciTech Patent Art Services Private Limited

AI Driven Innovation: Global information sources are growing exponentially. Further, enabled by technology platforms such as IoT, AI and MEMS, new competitors are entering markets at a rapid pace. This presents a unique opportunity (and challenge) for R&D scientists and their information analysis support staff. Information from disparate sources needs to be tracked and distilled in a timely and cost-effective manner to identify new opportunities, innovations and threats. The speakers will share learnings from the implementation of AI/ML and Deep Web-based Technology Intelligence (CTI) programs at various global corporations in the US, Europe and Japan. Benefits reaped and execution challenges will be shared based on real global case studies.

Achieving Quality and Speed ... With Three Easy Hacks
Presenter: Lauren Lackey, Principal, Rewired Group

With tighter timelines and quickly changing preferences in the market, tips to move product development in the right direction are incredibly valuable. Bring back the passion for product without sacrificing time. Create value: better, faster and cheaper. How do we stop thinking in terms of time and start thinking in terms of a system — creating successful innovation again? There are three key steps that can start us back on the right path, achieving the right product at the right cost, in the right time. 1) Understand the consumers' struggle and translate it to design. 2) See every opportunity as a system. 3) Measure what is important to the consumer, not the internal community. Introducing: GREEN LINE DEVELOPMENT

Hedgehog Innovation Teams: Focused, Nimble, Dangerous
Presenters: Ty Hagler, Principal, Trig; Pat Boehnen, Senior Director, Liberty Hardware, a Masco Company

How might we disrupt the experience of buying a shower door? Pat Boehnen with Liberty Hardware and Ty Hagler with Trig share practical lessons from their track record of repeatedly breaking into new consumer product categories, unseating incumbents. We learned that separate innovation teams with appropriate timelines and budgets can accelerate growth, allowing traditional product teams to focus on operations. We will provide relevant examples of categories that have been reinvented, organizational models that work, and how external partnerships can accelerate speed to market.

Pathways: Driving Innovation Acceptance
Presenter: Douglas Powell, Director Innovation Practice, StoneLaurel Consulting

The path to real change is more than sticky notes and brainstorming. True experience design and implementation requires an aspirational purpose, clear phases, behavioral and emotional pathways and a great story. Learn the base techniques for developing all of these and understand the hidden secret of driving experience adoption — pathways. Pathways allow you to take control of the outcomes of your work and provide clear behavioral metrics that tell you when you've reached each milestone on the way to success.

More than IoT...Building a Connected Experience
Presenter: Devin Moore, Creative Director and Founder, Big Bang

Products at the intersection of physical and digital are more than the sum of their parts, and because of the wicked complexity of integrated/connected products and services, it has become necessary to rethink the process for developing these devices. We can no longer expect hardware and software teams working in silos to produce comprehensive, cohesive and engaging device experiences. Instead, it requires guiding different teams that can have very different timelines and processes, while trying to avoid the siloing of resources and activities. And we must do all of this while maintaining, or thoughtfully adjusting, the user storyline.

WATCH OUT—Gen Z Is Coming! Will Your New Products Deliver?
Presenter: Nadine Williams, Director of Marketing, Shenandoah Growers Inc., Felicia Rogers, Executive Vice President, Decision Analyst

Move over millennials, Gen We (aka Gen Z) will represent 40 percent of all consumers by 2020. How do we consider this new generation’s needs without ignoring generations of the past (the other 60 percent)? How is your brand approaching this climate change? Through the lens of a practitioner, we will explore together what every innovator should know and put into practice in their development process. From concept screen to product launch, we will share the tips and tricks to make sure that your new products of the future will appeal to generations to come.

Defining Customer Needs in Complex Value Chains
Presenter: Donald Ross, President, Innovare

Design thinking guides us to explore the customer’s problem space before creating solutions. That can be a challenge in B2B markets. Manufacturers can be several steps removed from final users, and there are many influencers and stakeholders in the value chain that make up the customer’s environment. This presentation will show how two teams in industrial markets with complex value chains conducted immersive discovery research to explore the problem space and define customer needs. Their markets included performance alloys in electronics and polymers in architectural glazing. Attendees will gain insights into methods that will allow them to start building an approach to explore their customer’s problem space.

The Mixed Methods Minefield: Innovation in Health Care Research Services
Presenter: Christina Stefan, Sr. Design Researcher, Design Science Consulting, Inc.

New quantitative and qualitative methods for understanding the multi-factor nature of experiential worlds are flourishing. Ethnographies, focus groups and usability studies are just a few of the tools available to service designers. But how should they strike the right balance? In this talk, we examine mixed-methods research conducted on behalf of biotechnology and life science companies. By approaching customers' worlds from multiple angles, our case studies demonstrate how to harness numerous, often conflicting, methods to drive innovative solutions.

Delivering the Fairy Tale: Near Real-time Cross-border Wires
Presenter: Cheryl Jacobs, Global Product Manager, Wells Fargo

If you had asked payment professionals back in 2015 if we would ever see same-day cross-border payments tracked like my Domino's pizza and transparency when it comes to fees, it seems a bit like a Cinderella story. Nevertheless, here we are in 2019 and that fairy tale is reality — the glass slipper fits. Add the pumpkin to a carriage transformation to validate and support in-country requirements to eliminate errors and significant pain points solved!

The Missing Link for Success in Strategic Alliances and Partnering
Presenter: Ruth Barry, Director of Electrical Engineering, bb7

Too often the qualification process for an integrated product or system element doesn't include a full cross-functional team which includes resources knowledgeable in product development, manufacturing, and product support. As a result, your company’s reputation can be damaged by a flawed product development process, inconsistent manufacturing quality, or a lack of a solid product support strategy. Designing the team and process with all key areas included will improve your success rate with strategic alliances and partnering.