Empowering Customer-Centric Product Development with Vidya Dinamani of Product Rebels

Revolutionize your product development approach with the insights of Vidya Dinamani, the dynamic force behind Product Rebels. In this electrifying exchange, we unravel the art of creating products with a genuine customer focus. Vidya, with her rich history of innovation, walks us through the three pillars and practices that transform business understanding and customer problem-solving – principles she's passionately laid out in her book "Groundwork." Our conversation not only highlights the essence of Product Rebels' methodology but also offers an eagle-eyed view into the practical, hands-on training that equips teams to make customer-centric product decisions confidently.

Embrace the digital transformation as we dissect the journey from face-to-face workshops to the burgeoning realm of virtual learning. Hear firsthand how Product Rebels' expanded 10-week program fosters more profound interaction and iterative feedback, cultivating consistently impressive net promoter scores. Get inspired by the success story of a B2B company that, under Vidya's tutelage, shifted its product launch strategy with staggering results. And for those navigating the startup sphere, we share battle-tested maneuvers to conquer common hurdles and strategically sprint ahead. Join us for a session brimming with strategies to amp up your product game and leave you equipped to forge deeper connections with your customers.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:03

Hey everyone, welcome back to the growing Lean podcast sponsored by Lean Discovery Group. This is your host, dylan Burke, also known as Deej, and I'm happy to be here today with Vidya Dinamani, founder and partner at Product Rebels. Welcome, vidya.

Speaker 2: 0:18

Thanks so much for having me, Dylan. It's my pleasure.

Speaker 1: 0:24

So, vidya, to get us started, can you give us a little bit about your background and history and what led you to founding Product Rebels?

Speaker 2: 0:33

Sure, I've been in Product 4 for quite a long time. I started off in technology a very long time ago I'm not going to tell you how long ago but worked in various different companies. I spent over 10 years at Intuit working on various different products the last being TurboTax and had a great exposure and great education, thinking about how to build amazing products that customers love. Intuit is just known for deep customer understanding, having wonderful techniques for being able to understand the customer problem and being able to develop products quickly, very successful products. So I was very lucky to spend a long time there and after that I went to Lead Product at a B2B company and what I found was that there's a lot of different places when I got out of my bubble of the one company I had been at for a very long time. So many companies don't really have these wonderful customer-driven product practices. So that really led us to say there's a gap here in the market.

Speaker 2: 1:41

My business partner, who was also at Intuit she was there for over 13 years. She and I started to give workshops, started to talk to early-stage companies and mid-stage companies, really about bringing really simple frameworks and practices in that they could very quickly better understand the customer problem, develop products better and get products to market more efficiently, more quickly and more confidently, that you would actually build products that customers want and actually love. So that's sort of the brief journey to say this is why we started our company, so that we could take a lot of the things that we'd learned in gosh decades of product leadership and be able to share those with teams that don't necessarily have the big infrastructure, all the different things that are needed in big companies, but they're able to do them really leanly. I love that about your podcast. How do you do them quickly and efficiently and get them to build products in a much better fashion?

Speaker 1: 2:47

Okay, amazing. Yeah, I love that, and could you walk us through your overall strategy for your business?

Speaker 2: 2:55

Sure. So the strategy for the business? Are you asking about the way that we go about reaching out to clients in terms of a business perspective, or actually what we do with clients?

Speaker 1: 3:07

So a bit of both.

Speaker 2: 3:09

Okay, so I'll start with what we do, and we actually wrote a book about it. It's called Groundwork and it really breaks it down into three core areas that we get companies to do. What we start with identifying the customer problem, and that sounds so simple, but so many companies don't do this very, very simple in perspective. What we think about is how do you look broadly at the problem space and then how do you converge into the most important customer problem that you can work with? And we have a template, we have a way to think about this that really helps our founders, our teams that we work with, get to that very focused customer problem. So that's really the first piece of it. Then we move to how do you understand the customer, and we call this an action of all persona because it's really about it's not just about the demographics and a broad picture, but it's really that depth of understanding that you can make product and business decisions based on your understanding of the customer. And again, a lot of the time we find that it's so broad. There's so many different types of clients and customers that our teams want to serve. It really is a matter of focus and prioritization. And then the third piece of this is being able to focus on customer needs. It's being able to translate what you've heard, what you've seen, and then make product decisions about. This is what I'm gonna build, and then build with confidence. So we start with what we call those three pillars and then we overlay them with three very simple practices around developing a hypothesis, so that you're always thinking about what do I know? What's the most important thing, that I need to learn and be able to focus everything that you do and all the learning that you do around that hypothesis. We have something called scrappy research, which is how do you, without a big research team and a lot of resources, how do you individually and again, whether that's a founder or it's a small team how do you go and learn really fast so that you are customer driven in everything that you do? And finally is how do you build alignment? This works just as effectively in really big companies as it does with trying to build alignment on your team. Maybe it's your investors, maybe it's your partners, but how do you very quickly get everybody on the same page? And this is what we call groundwork, and this is the foundation of what we do.

Speaker 2: 5:35

The business model of how we work is a little different. We found that a lot of time people try and do classes or training and it's all theoretical, it's a little bit academic and that doesn't really help you when you're trying to build a business and trying to build a product. So the way that we work is we actually work with the team over 10 weeks and we start with how do you first kind of we roll our sleeves up get to know your business, get to know the industry and the environment and your customers, and then everything that we have? We do have a learning management system, but everything that we teach the team's got to actually apply it. So it's very hands-on, it's actionable, it's practical, and then we're giving feedback. We're using our 20 plus years of experience to say how do you think about this? Here's some additional information, here's how you might learn from your competitors.

Speaker 2: 6:30

So it really, every week, is shaping the three pillars and the three practices and it's helping the team with the product that they're either working on, that they are in development with or, in some cases, they've recently launched, and so that business model of being there for a period of time, spending a few hours a week, really honing in and working on your product makes a pretty significant difference in the impact and the transformation that the work that we do has with teams. So strategically we position ourselves working for CEOs of smaller companies and product leaders of mid and larger companies, so that we come in and we're working with a complete product team. It's not just the product manager or the product owner. We bring in your lead developers. If you have a designer, if you have a researcher, in cases we have account management joining us, we have business management, business development, and so doing this together really helps our alignment across the entire organization.

Speaker 1: 7:35

Okay, that's awesome. I love that. And you mentioned that it's a 10 week course right, so do all your contracts end after 10 weeks. Is there no customer retention?

Speaker 2: 7:48

That's a great question. What we'd like to do is to try and get people to be able to do this work. So when we're there for 10 weeks, you have access to our platform for a year, so everyone is able to go back. Often we find teams going back and saying, okay, now we're going to work on another offering or even a service. They apply everything they've learned. Yes, we go back and we can run the 10 weeks again with the team. But sometimes it points to an area where there's an opportunity to do some deeper research and we can help with that.

Speaker 2: 8:23

Or there's a strategy session with leadership, because we've got all of these ideas that have been uncovered in the work that we've done. And so how do you choose? How do you access resources, how do you make those decisions? Balancing the customer, the business and the team, and so often the follow on work is a little bit more nuanced, it's a little bit more focused. But the whole goal for us is, if we spend 10 weeks with you, you are working and thinking differently and we don't want to be there forever. We want you to be able to take those 10 weeks and actually build better products at the end of it. That's our goal.

Speaker 1: 9:03

That's amazing and it's a bit different to most B2B business models where most of the time, people want to have an ongoing relationship with their client, but you kind of just want them to be able to do it without you. And that's super interesting and it shows that you are looking to provide value and not just make a quick back office, which is really awesome.

Speaker 2: 9:23

Yeah, no, that is not our goal at all. I mean, there are so many product teams out there and I know that it is not a typical B2B model where you are trying to get a subscription forever, and that's why we're very different from most training and coaching companies. Our goal is we've got this package that we know can work and we work from everything from early stage up to 1450. We've done transformation at scale. We've worked with some of the biggest names in the world and worked with 300, 400 just product managers to be able to help them bring this consistent practice to the way they work. And for us, that success I mean when you're doing 400 people you're there for a year and a half to two years.

Speaker 2: 10:08

This is a big deal, but for smaller teams we don't want you to be reliant on us. We want to give you the tools and the access, the follow on. Sometimes we had this ability to stay on as a product advisor and certainly some of our clients want us to come in, and that's a small amount of retention to say we know the company, we know the team, and so how do you then be able to come back and have access to executive product leadership, either as an advisory board for a certain amount of time. But again, that is not the goal. The goal is to really get yourself sufficient up 10 weeks 100%.

Speaker 1: 10:50

I love that. I think that's really awesome. And how have you adapted to changes in the industry? I see you've been around for about seven years in the business, so I think the most notable change was the pandemic. How did you adapt to that in terms of your business operations?

Speaker 2: 11:10

One of the biggest things that we had to change. We often would have a kick off with a team at the beginning of those 10 weeks. We would do this in person. Our teams were all over the world. We have been all over the States. We've actually been to South Africa, we've been to Europe, we've worked with teams everywhere and what we like to do is form that relationship. And so before the pandemic we would always have a kick off and bring everyone together and we would spend a half day or a full day workshopping some of these concepts and really getting to know people and kicking off the program.

Speaker 2: 11:49

Post pandemic it all turned virtual and so we ended up breaking the workshops into smaller no one. I think we know our appetite for spending hours and hours in front of our computers and zoom. It was really hard. So really the model changed to one of that's virtual. Originally our program was six weeks because you can move quickly when you're together and you have a longer period of time and then you sort of quickly move through the different pieces. It extended.

Speaker 2: 12:19

The 10 weeks now accounts for very few in person, I'd say. What used to be 100% in person kind of workshops and kick offs is now probably, you know, 90% virtual. There's a very small group of people who still want us to come and we still work together in person. That's the biggest shift and so smaller periods of time.

Speaker 2: 12:44

The work still is exactly the same, it's just that we've spread it out and we've actually found which is a bit of a silver lining to having to change a lot of different things that is much more effective, right. A little bit more time with the team, more iteration, more feedback across these 10 weeks really is helpful, and in those two weeks, those workshops that we used to have as a full day are now two for our workshops that we spread in on week three and week six, and you know that again, people can sort of spend that time. We've done a, I think, a really nice job Translating what used to be an in-person experience. We're very good now at the virtual experience and it also helps because so many of the teams that we work with they're no longer in-person together. They are spread all over the country, all over the world, and so having this ability to create really strong and and powerful virtual Experiences that bring the team together is an added benefit for the team. So that's been the biggest change to them.

Speaker 1: 13:49

Yeah, 100%. And have you found that? Has there been any shift in customer satisfaction in terms of changing from in-person to online? Because I'm, I can imagine, with like old-school businesses and old-school people. They don't really understand this, this virtual concept, so has that have been affected in any way?

Speaker 2: 14:12

No, because we we're both my my business partner and I have a deep experience in design thinking. We were already using a set of virtual tools in in order to Keep information going or during those those weeks. The coaching calls are always Over over a call. The the kickoff and the workshops are in person, pre-pandemic and so that you know and I love the question that you asked about customer satisfaction we measure net promoter score and that is the simple that will you recommend us to others and Typically our net promoter scores are world-class the 70s and 80s. This is an experience that really focused on individual and team development. So the individuals on the team get new tools. They are able to apply them immediately, which I think is very different again from from a lot of different coaching companies and training companies. Everything we do is immediately applicable. They work on it with their product. They see a result.

Speaker 2: 15:25

I'll tell you one team. I remember this from a few years ago. We came in and they were about to have a product launch. This is a B2B company, about 200 people and they had a really strong business and we're about to launch a new product and we had two teams Work together on our coaching. One of the teams was working on a completely new idea. The other was can is there anything we're missing before we launch, because we're in the last stage? It's a product development, and I think that was incredibly brave of them. It would have been easy just to say, nope, we're on a path, we've got a date, let's go for the product. Leadership said let's just, you know, make sure let's actually look at this and make sure that we're really connected to what the customer needs.

Speaker 2: 16:12

And so the team did the work and in about three to four weeks and now launch is now two months away they discovered something pretty significant in a miss that they had thought that the customer needed. They had built their product based on Conversations and understanding, but doing the deeper work with us, they had a big aha moment and they realized that while this new product, which was really some of more of a super feature rather than a completely new product, while customers had kind of given them, you know, indications that they were interested, that's not what they really needed and they certainly weren't going to pay for it. It was more of a sure, if it's there, I'll use it. And so they made the incredibly brave decision to actually scrap the launch. And but in that discovery and the reason they were able to do this is they uncovered something that was really important to the customer, and so the argument to the leadership was we need to pivot. We can use I think they could use about a third of the development that they already did, but they had to throw away a bunch of work because this was such a big learning.

Speaker 2: 17:29

They made the recommendation, they used the building alignment, building commitment to be able to convince, and the way that they convinced wasn't their opinion. They actually showed what the customer did, what the customer said. They created this really strong narrative and it was an obvious business decision to make. And so that's, you know, an example of and that was, you know, one of those times where there's lots of examples of transformation that I can give you. But that was so powerful because, you know, there was a machine in place to release this product and they actually pulled it because they realized that it wasn't going to be what they expected, and so it shifted to. Six months later, they launched this new product very successful, and they're able to monetize it in a way that they would never have been able to for for the initial direction that they're going in.

Speaker 1: 18:21

That's awesome. I love to hear stories like that. It's amazing. And Since you launched like maybe in your launch up period or any time since then what has been the biggest challenges that you faced Running your business and how did you overcome that?

Speaker 2: 18:40

I think some of the biggest challenges is, I tell you, is differentiation. You know I've talked to you about what we do and what's so important, about the way that we work and the way that we coach, which is on the person, the team, the organisation's product. But it's sometimes hard to differentiate yourself from larger organisations, and I think that anyone listening you know there's always competitors that are more established, they're much bigger, and so you know when it's easy for teams to go down the path and lead us to say I'm going to send you down this product coaching or this product training and differentiating ourselves. We're not agile, we're not safe. Our product teams can certainly work in those environments, but the goal is to bring in these really strong customer driven practices, and so for us, the biggest challenge has been establishing ourselves, as how are we different? What do we do? That's different, and so, in the way that we try to overcome this and I'd say this is still a work in progress we're still a pretty small shop, we work with a lot of big companies, but it's, you know, our goal is to try and get to many more mid-sized companies and to bring this type of training and thinking to those teams.

Speaker 2: 20:07

And so trying to do some thought leadership. You know we actually run a podcast ourselves and talk to interesting product leaders who have done brave things that have really stood up for their customer. And you know it speaks to our name Product Rebels. It's a question we named ourselves because we want to set ourselves apart. We want to say we fly that customer flag and sometimes it's hard, sometimes you're going against the grain, sometimes you're pushing against what the status quo is. So we brought in voices that have done those at really well-known companies and so a lot of this is again establishing sort of who we are, our voice and being able to say how we're different from typical product training companies. So that's really been an ongoing business challenge.

Speaker 1: 21:01

Okay, 100% percent, and I just looked at the time. We are running out of time, but I've got a couple more questions. Where do you see yourself and your business in, let's say, two years' time, if everything's gone right? What does your business look like then and what has changed from now to then?

Speaker 2: 21:24

What I'd love to see is that we have been able to impact a lot of those agile and safe-trained teams that have really focused on process over the last gosh five, seven, ten years, and that they are now open to product-led transformation. They've got good practices in terms of how they develop products and now it's really about let's work on the right things, and so ideally in two years, we're known as a company that can come in and really help very quickly bring those transformation processes in. This isn't a year to two years like agile and safe. This is a 10-week commitment, and so what I'd love to do is to see our team of product coaches grow. I'd love to see us be attached to those businesses who are in pain. They're building products, they're churning out a lot of software, but it's really not making a difference, and they know it.

Speaker 2: 22:38

And they're looking for something that can help them get back to really building products that customers and clients want and love and that we are known as a team that can help them get there. That's my dream, Maybe more than two years, but that's what I'd love to see.

Speaker 1: 22:56

I love that. Thank you, and before we go, what advice would you like to give other business owners looking to succeed in this ever-changing world?

Speaker 2: 23:07

I think the biggest thing is I'll go back to our first principle, which is it's really easy, I think, as a business, to want to solve lots of problems. You know, I think as a business owner, you see issues all the time and we're always thinking. There's always amazing ideas coming out and you get inspired by things that you read or things that other people are doing, and so it's really easy to say I could do. You know these 10 things, and then two weeks later you have another five things and I think the biggest thing, the biggest advice, is stay really focused.

Speaker 2: 23:39

We, you know, taking those two pieces, really understanding what problem that you want to solve, that you're best at solving and that you can monetize and who you're solving it for, and being disciplined and feeling like you give yourself permission to say no to most things and pick, pick the thing that you're going to focus on and go deep. And so you know, I think, our templates they are free to download. They can help with business owners as well, because it helps you think about what am I really trying to do here, what am I trying to change? Where am I trying to move the needle? And then, how do I really specifically focus, because everything becomes so much more fine tuned and it feels scary and it feels risky, but I think that's where success comes off, when you can actually go deep and you're going to delight a small group of people rather than try and spread and try to solve a lot of problems for a lot of different people. So that's that's the advice. That's completely based on the work that we do.

Speaker 1: 24:45

Amazing. I love that and I agree with you completely and thank you, Vidya, for your time today. What is the best way for people to get in touch with Vidya Dino Money if you've got any offers for them or if they're just looking to follow your journey?

Speaker 2: 25:01

Well, thank you, LinkedIn is a great way to reach out to me. Our website, productrebelscom. There's some of the templates that I talked about. They're all free to download and I invite you to do that and if you give you, if you get our templates, you will reach out and be on our newsletter if you opt in and be able to follow sort of the journey. So thank you for letting me share that.

Speaker 1: 25:27

Amazing, amazing, and thank you for your time today.

Speaker 2: 25:30

Thanks, it was very fun D Thanks again.