There was a time not long ago when a handful of Product Momentum guests (Rich Mironov and Marty Cagan to name just two) lamented the absence of any formalized university program dedicated solely to product managers. Lament no more, thanks to Brad Eiben and his colleagues at Carnegie Mellon University, where Brad is Executive Director of the Master of Science Program in Product Management. Launched in 2018, the program is a one-year experience that blends coursework in leadership and business strategy with such technical practices as UX design, development, and Agile methodology.

Our conversation with Brad actually began the night before we hit ‘record,’ following an action-packed day of conference keynotes at INDUSTRY Global back in September. In this episode, Sean and Sean reconnect with Brad as he explains how he applied the same product management principles he learned as a mechanical engineer at Toyota to his current role in Education.

“There are a lot of business degrees, and a lot of tech degrees,” Brad offers. “But none really bring that third element, which is the design thinking and practical application. So that’s what we strive to create – a truly hands-on program. I always describe the program itself as being a training program, not an academic program.”

In its own way, the program treats education as a proof of concept. Just as it is in real life, product management is a team sport, Brad says.

“In its ideal form, product management is a journey,” Brad says. “A student here is not a lone wolf; they’re part of the pack. When they approach product management correctly – working as collaborators, not as adversaries – and combine their skills to support one another, the effect is ten times more powerful.”

Be sure to catch the entire episode with Brad, where he explains why “the program is my product” — a marketplace in which the university is creating value for students, credentializing their work, and boosting their careers. And no doubt accelerating the maturation of product management as a profession.

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Sean Murray [00:00:19] Hey, everyone. I’m Sean Murray.

Sean Flaherty [00:00:20] And I’m Sean Flaherty.

Sean Murray [00:00:21] Welcome back to Product Momentum, a community of product people and a marketplace of ideas where leaders and learners come together to shape our way ahead.

Sean Flaherty [00:00:28] Our production team is the best in the industry, and we are dedicated to producing high quality content from thought leaders across the product development space.

Sean Murray [00:00:36] Check us out on your favorite listening platform or if you prefer the video experience. You can find all our latest episodes on the Product Momentum YouTube channel.

Sean Flaherty [00:00:44] Let’s get after it.

Sean Flaherty [00:00:47] We’re here at INDUSTRY in Cleveland, Ohio. We just had a great conversation with Brad Eiben, who runs the product management program at Carnegie Mellon. What an incredible opportunity to have him on the podcast. What do you think, Sean?

Sean Murray [00:01:00] That was super unique. I don’t know if we’ve had a podcast like that. Right. This this is going to be an all-new episode. I think there’s a completely new, completely new topics that we’ve never discussed before. Applying product management to education was really kind of like a novel concept and some awesome stuff!

Sean Flaherty [00:01:15] I think the audience is going to love it. I think he’s a great guest. He’s got a lot of great thought leadership to share and some great ideas. So, let’s get after it.

Sean Murray [00:01:23] Let’s do it.

Sean Flaherty [00:01:26] All right. We’re excited to be interviewing Brad Eiben from Carnegie Mellon University. What’s your official title there?

Brad Eiben [00:01:32] I’m the executive director of the MMS and Product Management Program.

Sean Flaherty [00:01:36] All right. Well, I met him at the bar last night. It’s always the beginning of a great story with me. We had some incredible conversations. I figured it’d be awesome to have some of those conversations here live in front of the audience so they could benefit from them as well.

Brad Eiben [00:01:48] Certainly.

Sean Flaherty [00:01:48] Yeah. So, you have a storied long history in design thinking, product management.

Brad Eiben [00:01:53] Yeah. Yeah. It’s interesting. And I always talk about how a lot of people don’t realize that so many PM principles come from, they derive from Toyota principles. And that’s where I started. My career is actually in mechanical engineering at a Toyota factory and manufacturing as dirty as you can get. But everything the problem solving methodology, the…no one there, at least in those days, no one called it design thinking. No one. It was about how do we create value and what is product management.

Sean Flaherty [00:02:25] I love that. We talked about getting close to the customer.  I think it’s Warren Buffett or one of his, might have been Charlie Munger says whoever gets closest to the customer wins, right?

Brad Eiben [00:02:25] And solves problems.

Sean Flaherty [00:02:25] That’s right. That’s like a product management mantra. So, your role at Carnegie Mellon. Talk about that a little bit.

Brad Eiben [00:02:59] So as we mentioned, I’m the executive director of the MS & Product Management program. And the first reaction, the first reflex should be what in the world is an MS in Product Management program?

That’s exactly what we are, where we’re focused on product management specifically, which separates us from…there are a lot of business degrees. There are a lot of tech degrees, there are a lot of business and tech degrees. None of those really have. The third element, which is the design thinking and the practical application. So that’s what we strive to create is a really hands on…I always describe the program itself as being a training program, not an academic program. And the difference being get your hands dirty, get in there and do the thing rather than read a book about the thing. If that makes sense.

Sean Flaherty [00:03:53] Yeah, for sure.

Brad Eiben  [00:03:53] So I direct the program, which means basically the program is my product. A good way to think about an academic program as a product is it’s a marketplace. We are creating value for the incoming students, giving them credentials, giving them career boosts, if you will. We’re also creating the students are a product that we’re creating for employers, for the market. So we’re right in the middle of that and we have stakeholders on both sides of those and balancing them, and that includes everything from the incoming material, that’s your admissions department, the product as well, the experience, which is the curriculum, student life, all these things and career support, which is like before they even start as students, we’re training them on networking and resumé reviews and all these things. So it’s the only way to think about it successfully or in terms that are creating value is to think of it as a product and an experience — more a service than a product. But that entire experience, including marketing the program, including everything, well, also including administration and the boring stuff. But that’s. Well, we’ll not dive too deep into that.

Sean Murray [00:05:15] I like that approach of like treating your education as a proof of concept. You have this hypothesis that this is what you want to do, right? You’re actually going to go in there and you’re not going to just learn about it and take tests. You’re going to actually practically go and do.

Brad Eiben [00:05:28] Yeah, yeah. And that’s so much of our…fortunately, I’m blessed with great professors, teachers, instructors. They, they bring real world cases. A lot of a lot of the classes are partnering with companies even in in the course of like a service design class or something that you would think is okay there are some exercises. We’ll just kind of do the same thing every year. But that’s not the case. It’s like very, very practical, hands on. And you don’t have to wonder after you’ve finished a lecture, how does this apply in the real world? Like it’s contextual to now. Yeah. On top of that, though, it’s interesting to think about bringing it back to managing, directing the program through a product lens. Yeah, every one of those elements that I described, the admissions marketing, there’s a ton of experimentation involved because there are not other product management programs, which means we have to, we can’t do what the MBAs do. We can’t do what the rest of academia does in order to create our identity and our brand, we have to experiment with different ways of, like most schools, they’ll, when it comes to marketing, they’ll advertise on Google and do the do the recruiting fairs and that type of thing.

But what we’ve done instead is experimented with, we partner with organizations like Women in Tech, which we’ve we take part in their conferences just like this. And that that gives us a very motivated audience to get our message to.

Sean Flaherty [00:07:00] Yes, you’re distinguishing yourselves from. You may or may not know this, but Carnegie Mellon product program is pretty renowned in our industry. You’ve done a good job, I must say.

Brad Eiben [00:07:11] I like to think that. But still, the idea that there is no category for product management programs, it’s.

Sean Flaherty [00:07:18] You’re the first. Yeah. Kind of establish the flag out there and it’s there seems like it’s gone quite well and you know one of the things we talked about last night is how you’ve actually restricted, you’ve restricted that, you’ve capped the number of students, you’ll take, Which I don’t know if it’s artificial or not, but you’ve created a forcing function for sort of getting high quality people who are really focused on that.

Brad Eiben [00:07:41] It also creates the experience as well. You’re not, you’re not a name in a number. It in its best, in its ideal form. And I talked to them even at orientation about this is like this this journey is a team sport. Like you’re not a lone wolf, you’re part of a wolf pack. If you if you approach it correctly and you’re not fighting with each other for the same job interview, you’re fighting with the rest of society. And if you take your skills and your skills and combine them and support each other, like the effect is ten times, and we see that frequently, especially, you know, every population of people has the leaders that sort of rise to the top and then shepherd everybody else.

Sean Flaherty [00:08:27] So power law, yeah? It’s this applies to every, every industry, right? It’s very cool.

Well, like I said, you guys are doing a great job, so thanks. So what do you do in this space? You’ve only been doing this for a handful of years. What has it been? A lot of change in our industry as well. Yeah, a lot of change. Yeah. Which I think begs the question about like, should we be more philosophical or should be more hands on? Like in an industry is changing as fast as I think you kind of have to be hands on.

Brad Eiben [00:08:57] I think, you know, I think that’s true. And this is sort of a very recent anecdote, but it’s not uncommon at all. One of…so in the summer, our students go to internships and they’re working with real companies in various sizes, industries, all that kind of stuff, and before they before they embarked…so their internships, they were still on campus. We had a prep session where was How to Succeed at Your Internship. And one of the things that I preached at that time, which I also preach just all the time, was, if you’re given a problem to explore, well, first start with the solution, but first explore it. But, if that problem lends itself to being in the field, to going to see and put your hands on whatever the problem itself is, that should be the first thing you do.

Sean Flaherty [00:09:52] Yes, absolutely. We preach about this in the product space, but we don’t do it.

Brad Eiben [00:09:58] But one of our interns, I think she might even be here. She did that, you know, early on, first week or two within the internship experience. Then fast forward to the end of summer. She was rehired or given a job offer Full time as a result. And they told like, that’s how you knock the socks off of your manager because that’s not people’s…it’s very comfortable to sit at your desk. It’s very it’s very comfortable to solve a problem that you’re imagining. But to actually question the reality of what I’m being tasked with is…

Sean Flaherty [00:10:35] And go talk to real humans out there in the field with real problems. It’s such a differentiator to understand the landscape and the context.

Brad Eiben [00:10:42] And so often to come back to your manager and say that’s not the real problem.

Sean Flaherty [00:10:46] Yeah, that’s a differentiator for sure. We also talked last night about cognitive biases. In the industry and not just the industry, but in life. So what’s, what’s your take on their, their application to product development and to our domain?

Brad Eiben [00:11:02] I think it, I think it fits our current line of discussion where the best product managers can be, they can be given a task or be looking for improvement ideas or new innovative features, whatever it might be. But if they can’t detach themselves at the beginning from their pursuit, they can’t adequately…like survey bias. You can’t survey a population of users or customers and get usable data or realistically or reliably usable data, if your survey is leading them in the direction you want them to go in the first place. And that’s…it’s almost like you should take your first survey draft and throw it out the window and know that I should not be asking these questions and start at you have to. Being agnostic to these things is a core skill.

Sean Flaherty [00:12:01] It is a core skill. Cognitive bias. Understanding cognitive biases for product leadership, I think, is of course skill because it clouds everything. Yeah. And we’re just where, you know, I think was Dan Kahneman that proved you can teach people about the cognitive bias and they’re still going to have the cognitive bias. Like, yeah, we know it’s a bias, but we still do it.

Brad Eiben [00:12:21] That’s where finding a good coworkers or editors or somebody who will tell you the truth, even if it hurts and say, okay, this, this is my draft, tear it to pieces and very few people are comfortable enough or confident enough or their ego is too fragile, to really say, yeah, to say, okay, tear this apart, tell me all the places I…and those have been…I’ve had some very trusted coworkers that I had no doubt that if I give them draft one, I’m going to I’m going to have some tears, but I’m going to have something much better at the end.

Sean Flaherty [00:12:59] Yeah, they’re going to give you some real feedback. Yeah, yeah. That that’s a part of without the puffer fishing. So I call.

Sean Murray [00:13:07] That’s a part of a core skill of what we have as product people is to know fear of being wrong, right? Because we’re going to be wrong a lot.

Brad Eiben [00:13:13] Yeah.

Sean Murray [00:13:14] We’re trying new things. And if you’re getting that as a part of your college experience, that’s invaluable.

Brad Eiben [00:13:19] Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that’s the getting back to the other. Like, that’s what’s so cool about this PM program. Within the context of the CMU University, you have this old traditional thing and then you have this small entrepreneur pocket and my team and I are all on board that like, okay, we know we have this job to be done. Let’s, let’s throw out some ideas as to what no one has ever done before to get there. And it’s when you if you either learn or you fail, Right. Or you either succeed or you learn, there’s.

Sean Flaherty [00:13:54] Got to learn to adapt. Yeah. And that’s that’s one thing that’s always true in our industry is it’s you never know it’s coming around the corner. You got to constantly be adapting. Getting, yeah. You know, pivots. The verb pivot is an important distinction in the product leadership space for sure.

Brad Eiben [00:14:13] It’s interesting because we do capstone projects in the final semester with the students and I work with the companies to sort of craft and refine and articulate what the problem statements will be for these projects. And one of the things I tell them is and I instruct the students when they get started is this it’s best to be somewhat open-ended. And if you change gears halfway through, that’s not only the best type of practice and nature of our business. And it because.

Sean Flaherty [00:14:41] Yeah, that’s amazing. That’s the purpose of research.

Sean Murray [00:14:45] So you spoke earlier about kind of applying product management to your actual program. Yeah, Right. So what are the, what’s like the vision that you’re setting? What are the objectives that you’re setting? How are you like letting students know like, this is our North Star? This is yeah, we’re trying to go.

Brad Eiben [00:15:02] I’ll give you the very high level because…

Sean Murray [00:15:04] That’s what I want. I only want at a high level because I’m not good enough to get the low level yet.

Brad Eiben [00:15:08] My goals, my intentions, what I hope to accomplish goes far beyond my program’s limitations. And by that, I mean at Carnegie Mellon specifically, if you look at the resources that we have and you look at if you were to do sort of a SWOT analysis of Carnegie Mellon University and product management, we have, we excel at we obviously excel at technology, we excel at business, we excel at design. So, the building blocks are there. We also have. So not only that, but when we’re talking about product management, we also have product designers, we have software, and we have the whole team right there at CMU. So, the way that I look at product management and you might say academia in general is right now, if I were to say, where is the place for what is the university, that is the university for law, you might say Harvard. You might say something like that. If I say, what is the university that is the PM or the product university, that’s not really claimed. But we have so many, like we have so many…there’s our program, there are other programs that are a little bit more engineering oriented that also produce product managers.

We have an MBA that has a tech track, so we have these different flavors and that’s part of managing the program is what is the portfolio and where do we fit within that portfolio? Who are our users for the MBAs users? But all that said, what I want to do with the product management program and with being at conferences like this with our partner, our cousin programs is establish CMU as the place for product. Like when a recruiter says, I need a product manager, we’re on page one and only if they strike out at CMU are they going to flip the page kind of thing and that, you know, build a virtuous cycle of the best students, the best recruiters, the best students, the best recruiters, the best experience throughout all of that. That’s really that’s the that’s the vision is when people think of product management, they think of Carnegie Mellon.

Sean Murray [00:17:22] That’s awesome. And you said something that’s absolutely true. Your vision exists like outside of the university, right? And like, your product vision shouldn’t be rooted in reality anyway.

Sean Flaherty [00:17:33] Because we don’t know what’s coming, right?

Sean Murray [00:17:36] Your long term aspirational goal, right? You see, like what’s Instagram’s is like to to capture and share the world’s moments, right? Like, you see, so many of these larger companies reference the world or Earth or, you know, they stay outside of the realm of reality right now and they’re still in their vision.

Sean Flaherty [00:17:54] Interesting. So, you mentioned something about surveys that struck me. So, surveys like trying to use surveys to collect product information so you can make better choices about your product. And I think they’re, you know, they can be useful, but it’s I think they can also cause delusions. I think that was the word to use for delusions. Right. And, you know, I always think back to Margaret Mead’s work, the quote from Margaret Mead, “What people say, what people do and what they say they will do are three completely independent things.” You know, when you think of surveys they’re so highly contextual the moment you’re taking the survey to like, wow, whatever happened in your day? Yeah, all those cognitive biases are stacking up. And you answer the question based upon the mood that you’re in, what’s happening? You know, somebody cut you off at the corner before you came in to take the survey, all that stuff. But they’re not really useful. You have to actually go watch human behavior.

Brad Eiben [00:18:40] Yeah. Yeah. And even a bad interview is equally bad. The watching is and I, I love watching for frustration in frustration. Frustration is my favorite thing about observation because, yeah, I was, I was. I was building a warehouse management system for a company I worked at…in-house usage. So I went out to the docks and talked to the guys that load the trucks and I walked up to them. I’m kind of new at the company and I walk up to them and I say, you know, can you kind of walk me through a little bit about what you guys do back here? Because I’m working on this system that is totally broken. And he didn’t say a word. He just shrugged his shoulders, looked down and said, Doesn’t matter. Nobody ever listens to me. Like that was just gold.

Sean Flaherty [00:19:34] That was just frustration.

Brad Eiben [00:19:35] Okay. We definitely have something to work with. We have some value to this equation for sure.

Sean Flaherty [00:19:42] So what do you what are you reading these days? Like, what’s got you excited in our in our space?

Brad Eiben [00:19:48] I typically stick Well. I guess there’s two kind of answers to that. There’s sort of the the repeat items, like we talked yesterday about the book Influence. Like to me, there, you encounter these things every day, and you always if you’re thinking about, I could have played that encounter somewhat differently or.

Sean Flaherty [00:19:58] Just like Cellini, right?

Brad Eiben [00:19:58] Yeah.  So going back to the basics and stuff like that. And then so I’m a, I’m a very natural introvert. I’m an engineer at heart. I,.

Sean Flaherty [00:20:21] I wouldn’t have got that last night. The bar by that, nobody,.

Brad Eiben [00:20:24] Nobody that I work with gets it. But after I give a lecture, I go collapse for like two hours. But yeah, but that’s so I’m constantly working. This is in context. This is, this is the persona. This is the result of reading books like Vanessa van Edwards and talking about how to deal with interpersonal communications and these types of things that are like there’s a set of things that are natural skills. And so that set of things that are synthetic skills adaptive, you’ve got to do them. Yeah, I’m kind of always looking for practical synthetic skills.

Sean Flaherty [00:21:01] Interesting.

Sean Murray [00:21:02] We ask as we ask this of all of our guests, how do you define innovation?

Brad Eiben [00:21:06] I have a definition for this: applying a tool or technique in a situation that it has not yet been applied.

Sean Flaherty [00:21:15] Well, Thank you for joining us, Brad. Obviously this is where you spend a lot of your time thinking about you’re producing the product managers of the future, appreciate the work that you’re doing. It was really awesome conversation last night. Yeah, this is great conversation to share the audience and I appreciate you. Thanks.

Brad Eiben [00:21:15] Great to meet you guys here, too.

Sean Murray [00:21:31] And if you’re out there, be careful if you see Sean in the bar, you might end up…

Sean Flaherty [00:21:34] On the podcast.

Brad Eiben [00:21:35] I’ll also say contact us If you want to hire our PMS, contact us if you want to apply for the program. Last second plug.

Paul Gebel [00:21:47] Well, that’s it for today. In line with our goals of transparency and listening, we really want to hear from you. Sean and I are committed to reading every piece of feedback that we get, so please leave a comment or rating wherever you’re listening to this podcast. Not only does it help us continue to improve, but it also helps the show climb up the rankings so that we can help other listeners move, touch and inspire the world, just like you’re doing. Thanks, everyone. We’ll see you next episode.