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23 / The Product Leader’s Path To High Performance

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Richard Banfield
InVision

As a community, have we gotten better at product leadership? The answer depends on who we ask and what we use to measure performance. In this episode of the Product Momentum Podcast, Sean and Paul pose the question to Richard Banfield, VP of Design Transformation at InVision. “A lot depends how much you are able to …

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Headshot of Richard Banfield
Richard Banfield
InVision

How To Conduct Effective Virtual Design Sprints

Coronavirus Adds New Opportunity For Distributed Design Teams To Go Virtual
Even before coronavirus isolated us from our software product team members, UX designers at ITX Corp. created a guide for translating the design sprint process to a virtual environment. Our already-distributed workforce has enjoyed using the virtual design sprint for months. And they’re confident its value will outlive the pandemic that inspired its expanded use.

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The Nature of Competition

Experience is what creates sustainable competitive advantage. This is the nature of competition.

The Experience Puzzle

Economists have argued for centuries about the nature of competition.

According to Adam Smith in the 18th century, every individual “intends only his own gain.” Therefore, he exchanges what he produces with others who sufficiently value what he has to offer. One thing many economists agree on is the elusive nature of individual utility. What one man values, others often ignore. This simple fact is what drives human innovation and ingenuity.

I was taught many things about competition and positioning in the course of earning my MBA, We read about Michael Porter’s five-forces model, Jerome McCarthy’s 4 P’s of Marketing, and a few other generic frameworks, which invariably describe the relationship between cost and target positioning. One model that stuck with me, as I have seen it used countless times in business, is a more traditional contextual model for determining the positioning of your product, your services and ultimately for your firm called “The Tradeoff Triangle.”

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22 / Combining Empathy with Tech

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Roman Pichler
Pichler Consulting

For today’s product leaders, it’s not enough to have technical proficiency or apply the right techniques. These skills are necessary to be sure – vital even – but no longer sufficient by themselves. Effective product leaders deliver even more. To make and implement effective strategy decisions, product leaders need buy-in from key stakeholders. In a …

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Headshot of Roman Pichler
Roman Pichler
Pichler Consulting

Measuring Loyalty

Authentic, self-determined loyalty only occurs after hard-earned, authentic trust is well established. This is true for interpersonal relationships just as it is for the relationships between customers and firms or between employees and firms. Trust is always a fundamental prerequisite to loyalty. If you are serious about earning sustainable and authentic loyalty, you must have established an authentic and thorough foundation of trust.

Once you have gained trust, the next natural step in your customer relationships is loyalty. The “buy 12 cups of coffee and get the 13th cup free” type of loyalty behaviors some companies use to bribe through discounts or freebies are not sustainable. You have to keep giving the discounts to continue to get the behaviors. The type of blind loyalty demanded by drug warlords or mafia boss “leaders” who use fear, manipulation or outright bribery is generally feigned as well. When a more powerful, more frightening or higher paying leader comes along, loyalty is quickly questioned.

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ITX Corp. Named 2020 Top Rochester Workplace

Employees Cite ITX Culture, Values, Service to Community
(April 1, 2020) Rochester, N.Y. — ITX Corp., a leading producer of custom software products, announced today its selection as one of the Rochester region’s top workplaces. Selections for the prestigious award are based on a scientific survey of company employees who rate their workplace culture. For the 7th year, the survey was administered through a partnership between the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle and Philadelphia-based Energage.

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Business Leaders Must Navigate Digital Transformation To Survive

Coronavirus Signals Need for Rapid, Lasting Societal Change
As I write this, I am closing out week three of the coronavirus lockdown across New York State. We’re all focused on the immediate impacts, and rightly so. But business leaders can ill afford to overlook the more profound, longer-lasting systemic changes.
Among them is our society’s readiness to accept, let alone embrace, the speed of technological evolution. Throughout human history, our resistance to change has delayed technological expansion and adoption.

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Boat with digital systems navigating the seas

Software Product Development Best Practices In The Age of Social Distancing

ITX Corp.’s Remote-First Culture Eases Transition To A New Normal
“ITX is a remote-first workplace,” marked the first words uttered by my HR contact during our initial screening interview. If they’re going to start the conversation with that, I thought, it must be pretty important.
Over that past couple years – but especially the past couple weeks – I’ve learned exactly how important these words truly are.

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Digital product at the center of distanced people illustration

The Leadership Flip

Frameworks, however flawed, are critical tools for leaders. Having a system to help you think clearly, segment activities, and create priorities, will help you create momentum and scale thinking through those you lead. It will help you achieve better strategic and tactical outcomes. The higher up you go in an organization, the more important it is to be able to share ideas and structure thinking in a memorable way.

Useful Frameworks

A useful framework will serve to order the thinking of your teams in ways that will align them, promote project confidence, and elicit intrinsically motivated, authentic commitment. It will reduce the collective cognitive load associated with strategy and prioritization and allow your teams and the people on them to spend more time creating and working toward your shared strategic goals. Analogies, metaphors, and contextual models, in the form of a framework, help us scale our leadership through others. When teams are using the same language and shared context, through metaphors, outcomes will improve.

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