Networking Unleashed: Building Profitable Connections. An Interview with David Fradin and Michael A Forman
- mforman521
- Jun 30
- 20 min read
📍 Hello. Welcome back to Networking Unleashed, the podcast where connections aren't just conversations through the currency of success. I'm your host, Michael Foreman, and today we're talking about one of the most exciting intersections in business where product success meets the power of people. My guest today is a seasoned product expert who uncovered the five keys to product success.
But here's the twist. It's not just about features and functionality, it's about the relationships that bring a product to life. I. From co-creation to customer discovery, from team dynamics to strategic partnerships, we're unpacking the how. Networking fuels every stage of building something truly successful.
Whether you're launching a new product, scaling an idea, or trying to find product market fit. This episode will give you a fresh perspective on how your next big win might come from your next big connection. So buckle up, get ready to take notes and let's unleash the network behind the product. And my guest today is David Frieden, and before I butcher his background completely, I'm gonna let him do that for you.
So David, how are you? Welcome to the show. Doing great. And my background is I've been involved in product success for 55 years. I currently consult and teach product management and product marketing. My number one client is Cisco and I and my trainers have probably trained about half of the product managers at Cisco worldwide.
Okay. That's very good. And what is it, and I read something in your background about apple computer and a business manager. Yeah. I was the business unit manager for the Apple three product line. And at the time there was just two profitable product lines for the company. The Apple three and the Apple two.
And Steve Jobs Macintosh was still under development. I, and I was actually working for a computer company when all of that first came around. I, back when the Macintosh was ever here of a Macintosh. Lisa? Yeah. Okay. So that's when I started working with the computers so that long ago.
Okay, so let's delve right into this. How does networking impact product success, especially in those early ideation and validation stages? I. Networking. I'm here in Silicon Valley and one of the reasons for Silicon Valley's success is the ease of networking and the culture of Silicon Valley.
If I introduced you to somebody else and you turned out to be a bum, it's not, does not reflect on me. It's just that everyone expects everyone to network In other cultures like the Japanese culture, I. If we were in Japan and I introduced you to somebody else, and you or somebody else turned out to be an idiot, then it would reflect poorly on me.
They for many years have had a culture of if a nail sticks up, you gotta pound it down. Whereas in Silicon Valley, if a nail sticks up, you try to help it grow and and thrive. I see that, the networking around in the US anyway, if I were to refer you to somebody and you turned out to be an idiot, that reflect poorly on me because the end person would say the last person at Mike.
Referred to me. He really didn't turn out to be the best. So I won't, I'll just take it all with a grain of salt. So it, I guess it really depends on what part of the country you're from or what country you're from. That's what many places like Silicon Valley. Silicon Alley, I think in New York and in San Francisco.
And others have studied the the culture in Silicon Valley, which is about 45 miles south of San Francisco. And they've tried to adopt the same level of entrepreneurship and ease of networking, and some of them have succeeded. Some of them have not succeeded because of the cultural differences.
Around the country and for that matter around the world. Okay. You talk about five keys to product success. Can you walk us through them and show and share how relationships played a role in each one. The five keys are a pneumonic of my company's name, spice, catalyst of the Word spice, where S stands for Product Market Strategy.
P stands for repeatable processes. I stands for having the information available necessary to make important decisions. C stands for understanding what it is that your customer wants to do, when they want to do it, why they want to do it, how they want to do it, where they want to do it. How important is it for them to get it done?
What's standing in their way and how satisfied are they with the current solution? And then the E stands for the employees and staff and consultants for the company to ensure that they have all 130 competencies or skill sets that I've identified that are essential to product success. So going back through each of them in terms of putting together your product market strategy.
No one product manager can do it by themself. They have to get involvement of senior executives, finance, legal hr engineering sales, marketing, purchasing, manufacturing. They have to be able to easily network, mediate and negotiate to get everyone on the same page. And on the same product strategy in the P area.
That's a repeatable process, and it was either Harvard or MIT found that those organizations that had repeatable processes that they enhanced and improved over time tended to be more and more successful. I had one client I was consulting with and I asked him if his company had repeatable processes and this VP of product management said, no.
They introduced five new products, all five failed. And then when they went into their retrospect, everyone sat around pointing fingers and everybody else because they didn't have a repeatable process that everyone agreed to. The eye for information you have to network to get that information.
You may have to go to your corporate marketing department and make sure that they subscribe to the market research studies and reports that are necessary for the market that you're in. The c is composed of three or four steps of networking. First to observe what your customer's doing, then interviewing your prospective customers that fit the personas that you're targeting and the target market.
Then surveying a representative sample. Then if you have big data available, you can do analytics on that and employ artificial intelligence to mine. That information. And then lastly, in terms of the 130 skill sets that your employees have to have some of them or a lot of them are gonna get, just get picked up on the job.
So to be able to network with people find mentors that will help mentor and coach you through developing the skill sets and the competencies necessary for your success and for product success. Okay. Okay. When building your product team, how did your network influence who you brought on board?
It's usually their references their introductions. And then I would go on and interview 'em from there, check out their references and before I'd offer them an opportunity I. The second thing I would do is also assure myself that the values that individual holds maps into the values that I have and that the organization that I'm working for has, because if there's a conflict of values, usually the chances for success are sub substantially and severely diminished.
So when you have an employee that's been with the company for a while and they bring you in, how do you deal with that when they really, they don't match what you are looking for? One of the things I, every time I became a product manager, I would go out to lunch with each of the other people in the other areas that I mentioned earlier, manufacturing, engineering, hr, legal, and so forth.
And as part of that lunch, I would ask them, what is their personal goals in life? Where do they want to go? And I told 'em, if I can help you get there, I'll be, be willing to do that. The result of that is whenever I would go into a meeting and a decision needs to be made, I know where that person is coming from and where they want to go, and I can pitch the the decision along the lines that I know will help them out and their personal aspirations and therefore everyone could come together and be more successful.
It means a lot more to the employee when the management is looking out for them. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So how do you balance listening to your network's feedback and staying true to your product vision? I. You by having the data to know what it is that your product needs to do for the customer.
I had one instance where I was teaching the Botswana and telecommunications company and Botswana, and I wanted to go to Botswana because I was wondering how can you get a country northeast of South Africa? And a a product manager from one of the South African banks asked if he could come to Botswana and sit in on the class.
And he did. And about halfway through the product management class, he said that a person I. That was just hired as a general manager in another area of the bank, convinced the president to cancel his product line and he had 12 engineers and two or three product managers and they were all just scared to death that they were gonna get fired.
I. And I asked them, did this if you had, if you have what's called a daci or RACI chart, which is DACI stands for decision maker who needs to be advised. C stands for who needs to be consulted, and I stands for who needs to be Informed which I advocate everyone to do put together such a chart before they start their product exploration and the strategy and development.
Because when it comes time to make a decision, not everybody is the decision maker. Some people need to be consulted with. Some people just need to be informed what the decision is, and he responded that they did not have that for this product, I. I said, if you did have that, would this new general manager have any would this new general manager have been on the da c chart at all?
And his response says that general manager would not be. So the thing to go back to when you get back to Johannesburg is ask for a meeting with the president. Show him your data as to why this product is important to the bank's customers and and that he should resurrect the product and if necessary tell the president.
He should ask this new general manager as to what their data is that recommends the cancellation of the product rather than that individual's personal feelings. Always bring the data. If you have the data to back you up, there's nothing that they can really say, except for ultimately no.
If you have the data to back you up you prove to be a great argument for that. Can you give an example of how a customer or a beta user beta user connection led a breakthrough in your product? I. I was working for a company called Docu Graphics, who's no longer around, and they were trying to build a new computer workstation built upon Motorola components.
Also write a word processing program and a computer aid. Drafting and design program. So they're trying to do something like Word perfect and AutoCAD plus a workstation sitting on top of a relational database, which I think they were writing from scratch versus using someone else's database.
And so that was they're trying to accomplish with a few million dollars. What in four major areas. Four. Multimillion dollar companies were doing like Apple, Microsoft, IBM sun word perfect Autodesk and so forth without the resources. So that, and they were trying to go after that broad market of desktop publishing.
So I went out and I interviewed the half a dozen or so customers that we had, and found that's not how they were using the product. That in fact what they were doing is using it to create and manage work instructions, manufacturing instructions that are set down to the floor. To show the assembly people how to build the product and also manage all the engineering change orders so that the right components are used in the right product.
One of my lead customers was lit and applied technologies, and they made fighter jet fuzz busters. So they had this little device in their jet. And when the enemy. Popped off a missile at them. This fuzzbuster would detect the missile and put out a signal to jam the incoming missile.
Now if something screwed up between understanding that the enemy has changed their frequencies, and this fuzzbuster was not picking that up, that the result was the pilot gets killed, and of course the plane is destroyed. So it was absolutely essential and important that the right version of the components for each build of the product was done correctly.
Each time I. So I was able to move the positioning of the product away from the general word publishing business to focus specifically on manufacturing instructions with the additional benefit that nobody else was in that marketplace at the time. So we could niche that puppy as they say in the business, and maximize.
Focusing all of our resources on that little market niche and become profitable. Yeah. Usually when in, in business, when you're focused, isn't exactly focused, when you have such a broad spectrum and then you focus in on one task, one thing, you become light years better than what you were before because you're focusing on that one thing.
You're not everything to any everybody, which. Really you can't be, so you're focusing on your lane and that really is very good. What's the role of strategic partnerships and how do you build those relationships from scratch? Strategic partnership is very critical because you always have to go through a build versus buy scenario.
And if you could find a partner that could provide some holes in your product. Or in your service, it's far better to partner with them than it is to try to go out and build a duplicate of it. And the way you do it is you approach them and say, Hey we're interested in a strategic relationship.
This is what we're doing. I understand what. You're doing can we sit down and talk about some way that we could work together? I had, when I was the business unit manager for the Apple three, about 500 hardware and software developers that had built products, hardware, and software for the Apple three.
And I sat down with all of them to do, put together a strategic partnership to make sure. That the money they were investing in my product line, that they'll get a return on that investment. And that included when we were getting close to shutting down the product line, no longer using it as a cash cow for the company.
I focused on moving all of my developers from the Apple three platform to the Macintosh platform so that they can continue to be a going entity. And when you're talking about the Macintosh, it brings me way back. I told you before that I started when the Mac Lisa was still around when the SE 30, SE 80 was just that one little nine inch black and white screen.
So I really, it brings me way back to my, my, my Roots. A lot of founders struggle with getting their first users. How can networking accelerate user adoption? I. I'll give you an example. I joined a company that I was recruited to join called rich Relevance back in 2007 or so. And they had a bunch of people come out of Amazon's recommendation engine research and development area, and they had built a personalized recommendation system like Amazon's.
And they were, and they got some venture capital investments and one of the venture capitalists knew the VP of IT at Sears the holding company. So he introduced US to Sears. I. I flew out to Chicago went to the Sears campus, which is off of one of the suburbs there. Met with that VP and with the general managers and with the head of sears.com, and worked out an agreement for them to buy this recommendation engine and install it on their website.
It was like a $15 million deal. And then in typical Sears style, they insisted since I was going to be a vendor of Sears, that they have to I also have to give them some stock in rich relevance. And that's what Sears did for. Many decades with many of the suppliers to Sears, and turd owned pieces of the companies that were supplying them.
We worked all that out as a strategic partnership. And I emphasized the importance of making sure it worked even to one point. After the president of the company promised Sears that if his recommendation engine, which is running another servers crash, it would not crash the Sears website.
One morning, about five o'clock in the morning, I get a call that says The Sears site is down. We think it's rich. Relevance, fix it. So I organized a task force to jump in there and fix it before more than several million dollars in sales were lost. And they were happy with that, to the point in which I could ask them for references and referrals to kmart.com, sears parts.com, and the rest of the other 90 three.com websites that Sears holding owned at that time.
Wow. Wow, that was really good. What networking advice would you give to product creators who are great at building but not great at connecting? They gotta get out of their shell or find somebody for marketing or business development or sales that are good at that and let 'em go and don't be paranoid about it.
That's one thing that, in, in my talks I go coast to coast and I'm a public speaker. I always talk about introverts and extroverts. The people building are usually introverts and they always have to get with an extrovert. And that's the sales and marketing and everything else part of the business.
But the introverts are the builders, so that's how I get to them. You also run across a personality that thinks they are number one and they cannot allow somebody else to take the lead. This guy that was one of the founders of Rich Relevance was one of those, and I remember we went to a conference in Orlando, Florida.
And the primary value proposition for Rich relevance is it helps increase your sales or what in the e-commerce business is called Lyft. So I said, let's get a bunch of balloons and put rich relevance on it and tie them up to shopping carts, which is related to the shopping cart on the e-commerce site.
And this was an e-commerce conference that was going on. With other companies there, like Sears, looking for products like rich relevance personalized recommendations. So he got his nose a little out of joint because I had come up with a better idea for marketing company and I started talking on the floor with a lady from Tiva, which is a alternative sugar sweetener.
He had to budge his way into that conversation and brag about how much he likes Steve, which had nothing to do with the strategic partnership I was trying to put together. And as a result, I wasn't able to develop anything there. So it, you have to tell these guys better off that you keep your nose out of my business, let me do the thing that I do best and let the company go.
But you're right, but some people just don't wanna let go and that's what happens. That's what could happen. Okay, so what's one relationship that had a major impact on your product's trajectory and how did you build it?
I guess one thing that comes immediately to mind is that. When I took over the Apple three product line as the business unit manager, that was as a result of Steve Jobs convincing the executive committee at the time, this was 1983, to cancel the product line because Steve felt that the Apple three was in the business and office market where he wanted his not yet shipping Macintosh to be.
He had not yet learned from Dave Packard and Hewlett Packard that it's better for him to cannibalize his own products rather than have someone else do it. After it was canceled. I was called into the president's office and he said, Dave we canceled the Apple three product line. I said, I know you did, and you didn't bother to ask me about it.
I have the full responsibility, but no authority. And he and so Scully says, what should we do about it? And I said, what do you mean we pale face? Get the joke. So I had to explain to him that there was this fictional character, the load ranger that Moore White rode a white horse. I got it right away.
Rode a white horse, had one silver bullet in his belt, and he rode around doing good and fighting evil. And he had an Indian sidekick by the name of tto. And when I tell this story to Indian Indians, I have to say an American Indian sidekick, and the story goes is that the. Load Ranger and TTO are surrounded in the desert by 10,000, yelling, screaming Indians.
And the load ranger turned to TTO and says, tto, were surrounded by 10,000, yelling, screaming Indians. And all they want to do is scalp us. What should we do? And TTOs, who was an American Indian says, what do you mean we paleface? That's right. Scully snickered. And I explained to him that I have all the responsibility, but none of the authority give me.
Full authority as an independent business unit. Which he and the executive committee later did. And as I was running that we had sold, we had sold 23,000 of the 25,000 Apple threes that we had in inventory, representing about a third of all the apple threes that were sold up to that point in time.
And then the company announced that they're gonna have an Apple two Forever event, and the same day they're gonna announce the Apple two C and they're gonna have 24 demonstrations stations at the Musco Center up in San Francisco showing different apple two products. But they would only give one to me for the Apple three.
And my director of communications, who had been around Apple for many years at that time came to me, he says, look, we're just opening up another can of worms to explain to the dealers that the company's still behind the product, but only one out of 24 demo stations is the Apple three. And I don't think we could do that anymore.
I don't think the dealers are gonna believe us or trust us. So I think we should shut the product line down. So I did that day in April 1984. But in the process of doing that, I also had it as a customer, a company out of Utah called Sun Remarketing remarketing, no, no relationship to Sun Microcomputers.
And he would buy end of inventory chronics from like Osborn and Compact and so forth, and then resell 'em. So I flew out to Utah and sat down with him and we cut a deal for him to buy the remaining 2000 apple threes so that when I shut the product line down, all of 'em been sold, all the profits had been gained.
It was enough money to help pay for the finishing of the Mac development and also to keep about a thousand to 1500 Apple employees employed until the following January. Of 1985, Steve had cut the sales force eliminated it. He fuck discontinued the lease a product line that he had been made.
General manager of, in addition to the Mac and Mac sales, dropped to four units because there's nothing you could do with the, existing Macintosh at the time, because the largest program you could write was 10 K, and it had to be an Apple basic, which was not a very verbose programming language.
And a couple, three months later, the board fired him and and then moved on. That's all right. That's, yeah. You, I know I keep saying this over and over again, but you're talking all about your background in Apple and everything else. And that was my beginning in the computer era and it's like old home week.
That's really, it's everything you're discussing. I was part of that a dealership, but I was also a systems engineer with Apple computer, so everything is all coming together. If someone is just launching a product today, what three networking moves should they make in their first 90 days? I. Once they've started putting together their product market strategy, one component of that is their distribution strategy.
So that's when they figured out are they gonna use a distributor, are they gonna go direct? Are they gonna build a direct customer website? Are they gonna use a sales force? Are they gonna use a value added reseller? Are they gonna use a, an original equipment manufacturer? So you have to figure those things out as to what is the best way to bring your product to market.
Do you want to do it in the United States first, and then Europe second, and then Asia third. And then you start cultivating relationships in each of those areas that your distribution strategy tells you that you're going to do. That's great. Now David, you apparently are very successful and you're very knowledgeable in what you do.
What's your biggest mistake that you made and how did you overcome it?
I think the biggest mistake that I've made in my entire career is going to work for companies or organizations. That either did not have a set of values or did not follow those set of values. And third, did not map into my values. And one of the things I did when I was writing, building, and sailing great products which is available on Amazon, is that I was familiar because of my work in the high tech business and in the dealing with the supersonic transport and the space shuttle. When I was in college, I was personally known to or knew of the presidents of most of the Fortune 500 companies in the first Fortune 500 list, and I had read many of their annual reports.
So I made a list of those Fortune 500 companies, and I had three columns. The first column was did they have values, and if so, did they follow those values? And then the third column is, are they still in business? And I found with o, almost without exception, those companies that either did not have values or did not follow values, they were no longer in business.
So that began to tell me how important values are, and I wondered if that applied to my personal career. So I made a list of about 25 organizations that I've been associated with throughout my career. These are for-profit companies like Hewlett Packard and Apple and others. Non-profits like the nonprofits that I started and the flying club that I started at Michigan.
And homeowners associations of which I've been. President of, without exception, those that had either no values, did not follow their values and or did not map into my values, I either got fired and that was a mercy killing and I felt better the next day or I quit and I felt better the next day.
But in those in which all three. Mapped up. They had values, they followed values like Hewlett Packard and Apple. I thrived and I was very happy and very happy to get up in the morning and go to work there. So the number one mistake that I made and those organizations that didn't have that, is I didn't examine that before I agreed to join them.
I had a property manager for my rental property that I owed on the beach in Aui, and he came back to the Bay Area and was looking for a job, and I told him that story. I said, after they start interviewing you and they finish their questions, you ask them what are their values and then you decide whether or not you're gonna join that organization.
He said a few days later, he went out on an interview and he started talking about values, and he talked with the hiring manager for four hours about values. They hired him and he said he is never been happier at a job in his entire life. Sometimes that's all you need is just a push in the right direction to make sure that your values align with the companies and it's very good advice.
David, this was a blast. I love talking to you especially about Apple computer, but if somebody wants to get a hold of you for whatever reason, how would they get a hold of you? They can go to my website spice catalyst one word.com. All my contact information is there. All my books are there, all my training courses are there.
And then there's a extensive blog with hundreds of articles about all aspects of product success. They can also go to Amazon, any place in the world. Look up my name David Freight and all my books will come up including workbooks for many of my courses that people could use to put together their five keys to product success.
Fantastic. David, this was so great. I thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Glad to be with you.
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Well, that's a wrap. Folks, a huge thank you to our special guests for sharing such incredible insights today, and of course, a big shout out to you, our amazing listeners, for tuning in and spending your time with us. Remember, networking isn't about being perfect, it's about being present. So take what you've learned today.
Get out there and make some meaningful connections. If you enjoyed this episode, don't forget to subscribe. Leave us a review and share it with someone. You could use a little networking inspiration. Let's keep the conversation going. You can find me on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or my website MichaelAForman.com
foreman dot remember. Until next time. Keep practicing. Keep connecting, and keep building those relationships. This is Michael Forman signing off. Take care and happy networking.
Michael is a business networking expert specializing in enhancing professionals' networking and communication skills to drive profitability. As a leading authority in this field, he is highly sought after for his dynamic presentations and workshops. His extensive experience has consistently led to significant improvements in corporate profitability by empowering individuals and organizations to connect more effectively and efficiently.
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