Lessons - How to Create a New Product, Kenny MacKenzie, CPO at Predictable Revenue

Hi, it's Scott here. On these lessons, episodes of my podcast, I'll be selecting my favorite lessons from various guests and episodes of success story. Today you're going to hear from Kenny McKenzie, Chief Product Officer at Predictable Revenue. Now Kenny is a pillar of innovation at Predictable Revenue, helping lead the development of their products and services. He's also a sought after speaker making appearances at international sales and technology conferences. So today he's going to teach you about what to look for as a founder, as a CEO, as a marketer, as a salesperson when you're launching a new product. So this could give you some context for is my product going to be successful in my target market. How do I avoid biases? How do I avoid assumptions? How do I get the proper feedback? So everything to do with launching a new product when you're first starting out, or it could be you have a successful company and you want to see if a new product you're launching in an already successful company is going to be a hit. He's going to go through all of it without any sort of bias. The funny thing is that as a marketer, you tend to look at things like demographics from a graphics, but it really boils down to what people want. And so it doesn't matter all these demographic attributes that people look at. Those are just sort of like proxies for the actual thing that matters, which is what do they want. So that's number one. You've got to find a group of people who all want the same thing. And the easiest sort of best way to do that, frankly, is having conversations, interviewing them and doing it right. There are all sorts of traps like you want to avoid cognitive biases. So you've got to approach this like a scientist, like an investigator. You think that there has been a crime where all these people have been wronged in some way. And you're trying to investigate the culprit, who's causing all these people all this pain. You can't go into it being like, I want them to like my idea. So you've got to leave any ideas you have behind and really just try and understand what is this group you will want. And then work from there towards a solution. And it's like Ash Maria is really good at sort of articulating like, he's gives this analogy when it comes to startups or building new products. It's like you got a door, like your market is like a door with a lock on it. And you're building a key. And so what most people do is they'll build a key and then go door to door to door to door to door, trying to open doors. Like what are the odds that you're going to just build a random key and be able to go and open some random door that you walk up to? I love the analogy. That's a great analogy. Yeah. It is. I got to get Ash Maria for that one. Yeah. If you pick a door and you study the lock and you basically act like a locksmith and then you design a key specifically for that lock, you can open the door. And sometimes I think that, you know, there's also the, there's these waves of technology that come, right? And whenever there's like a new wave of technology in it, so it goes from the like over the hype cycle and it actually gets developed and it's hitting that like plateau of productivity or whatever. It's becoming viable. Like that's now there's this whole new suite of opportunities for being able to unlock sort of new ways of solving problems. And so that's like being able to combine those things as part of the equation. And so you might discover a real market opportunity, but like the way to solve that might not come for another eight years or something, especially if you're looking at specific type of technology. So that's the second sort of challenge is being a prize building. That's why it's so hard is because like, it's all the very complex challenge when you run into the rest two of the market being too small. Yeah. I mean, you want to basically, you want to try and pick like a job to be done, sort of a contextual progress. People want to make. You have a very small group of people who really, really, really want to make that progress. But if you help them make that progress and you basically make it easier to make that progress, more and more and more and more people are going to also want to make that progress. Yeah. So you basically develop a solution that so addresses an existing, really compelling market need for a very small group of people. But by doing so, it makes the market grow because the more people who see, oh, wow, they were able to make that progress. I want to make that progress too. And so then it kind of like that's a blue ocean, right, that that would be the blue ocean strategy where you're technically building your own market. Yeah. And usually when you have like a product flying off a shelf type product market situation, yeah, a product market fit situation, it's because you're building a new market. Like it's rare that you're going to go into a really noisy market and do that. Unless you've got something really novel and compelling that like allows people to make some whole new type of progress. Otherwise, why would they be flocking to you if there's all these comparable competitors?