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Product Mastery Now for Product Managers, Leaders, and InnovatorsAuthor: Chad McAllister, PhD
Welcome to Product Mastery Now, where you learn the 7 knowledge areas for product mastery. We teach product managers, leaders, and innovators the product management practices that elevate your influence and create products your customers love as you move toward product mastery. To see all seven areas go to https://productmasterynow.com. Hosted by Chad McAllister, PhD, product management professor and practitioner. Language: en-us Genres: Business, Management, Marketing Contact email: Get it Feed URL: Get it iTunes ID: Get it |
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616: TRIZ for product managers, without years of training – with Jay Nakagawa and Bill Reid
Monday, 2 November, 2026
AI tools for accelerating TRIZ and JTBD Watch on YouTube TLDR Jay Nakagawa and Bill Reid recap their workshop from the 2026 PDMA Ignite Innovation Summit on combining Jobs-to-be-Done and TRIZ and using AI tools to accelerate their analyses. These tools help product managers eliminate contradictions between competing customer demands instead of settling for trade-offs. Introduction Your customers want it faster, better, and cheaper, all at once. Most product teams pick two and call it a trade-off. What if the trade-off is a contradiction you can solve, resulting in much greater value? I recorded this episode at the 2026 PDMA Ignite Innovation Summit, where that question was answered. Two returning guests join me. Jay Nakagawa is Co-Executive Director of the Society for Artificial Intelligence and Competitive Intelligence (SAICI) and is also the Director of Competitive Intelligence at Dell Technologies. Bill Reid is Vice President at Boulder Imaging and has spent more than 30 years developing products at companies including Ford, GE Aircraft Engines, and GM. He is named on more than 20 US patents. At the PDMA Ignite Innovation Summit, they led a workshop that combines Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD), TRIZ (Theory of Inventive Problem Solving), and generative AI to turn hard constraints into product breakthroughs. Let’s learn a practical, 80/20 way to apply TRIZ principles and how generative AI can speed up inventive problem-solving so you don’t have to be a TRIZ expert. Summary of Concepts Discussed for Product Managers TRIZ: A Framework for Solving ContradictionsGenrich Altshuller developed TRIZ while working in a patent office. He believed anyone could be an inventor. He looked at patents to study how people solve problems and found patterns that held across fields. His tools include separation principles, technical contradictions, substance-field analysis with 76 standard solutions, and 12 trends of technical evolution. Bill describes TRIZ as a how-to book for solving known contradictions among constraints. Bill and Jay have combined TRIZ with Jobs-to-be-Done and competitive intelligence to identify and prioritize customer needs. AI Tools for Faster TRIZ AnalysisUsing AI tools can accelerate TRIZ analysis from weeks to minutes. At the PDMA conference, Jay and Bill led a workshop on using TRIZ and Jobs-to-be-Done with AI tools. Jobs-to-be-Done and TRIZThe workshop started with guiding product managers to understand their customers’ Jobs-to-be-Done statements. Bill used the example of a quarter-inch hole. The JTBD statements are to minimize the time to make the hole, minimize damage to the wood, and maximize accuracy. Improving speed leads to increased damage to the wood. That is a contradiction among customer needs. Workshop participants used a contradiction matrix from TRIZ to plot technical parameters corresponding to customer needs. Teams then used the contradiction matrix to brainstorm solutions. Know Fundamental Principles to Evaluate AI OutputAnalysis can be accelerated using AI tools, but as Bill and Jay explain, in order to know if the output of an AI tool is reasonable, you still need to understand the basic principles behind JTBD and TRIZ. It is still critical to have humans in the loop. Training AI on Jobs-to-be-Done and TRIZIn the workshop, Jay and Bill provided some files to train AI models to use JTBD and the 40×40 TRIZ matrix. Each participant loaded these files onto their own AI tools. The models were then ready to answer questions using these principles such as how a company can make its product more valuable or how difficult each contradiction would be to resolve. Participants described customer objectives, and the AI models used their training to give ideas on how to meet those objectives, using JTBD and TRIZ. Combining JTBD and TRIZ to Identify and Solve ContradictionsSolving one contradiction often reveals a new one, which is why a manual TRIZ analysis can take weeks or months. Jobs-to-be-Done identifies customer needs and prioritizes desired outcomes. The TRIZ framework points product managers to possible solutions by eliminating contradictions. Useful Links Watch Jay and Bill’s pre-conference webinar on TRIZ and JTBD, “From Contradictions to Breakthroughs” Download files on TRIZ and JTBD for training an AI model: TRIZ Contradictions Matrix Know Your Customers’ “Jobs to Be Done”, Clayton Christensen Jobs to Be Done LLM-based Extraction of Contradictions from Patents 40 TRIZ Principles Connect with Jay and Bill on LinkedIn Learn more about Jay’s Society for Artificial Intelligence and Competitive Intelligence Check out Jay’s book, The UnConventional Strategist 603: Survive the AI revolution of product management – with Bob Cooper, PhD Innovation Quotes “And suddenly the inventor appeared.” – Genrich Altshuller, creator of TRIZ “Get rid of the box.” – Jay Nakagawa Application Questions What are some contradicting outcome statements for your product? What do you do when your team must make a trade-off between contradicting customer needs? Which disciplines are missing from your team that might hold the solution to your hardest product problem? How do you use AI tool for analysis? How do you ensure AI-created outputs are reasonable? What is your experience with TRIZ and JTBD? What small step could you take this week to learn more about these tools or start using them? Bio Jay Nakagawa is a 25+ year veteran product manager, with a track record of successfully building new products and developing turn-around strategies resulting in high revenue growth. As director of Competitive Intelligence with Dell Technologies, he and his team have been instrumental in providing critical guidance to product management teams providing insights that encompass how to create differentiated offerings to the market. Bill Reid brings over 35 years of experience in all aspects of product development, from start-ups to global corporations like Ford, GE Aircraft Engines, GM, and Covidien. Since 2007, he has led innovation and consulting efforts through his company, Immersed, and currently serves as Vice President at Boulder Imaging, overseeing hardware engineering, production, supply chain, and professional services. Bill is a certified New Product Development Professional, serves on the PDMA board, and holds degrees in mechanical and aerospace engineering. He is the inventor or co-inventor on 24 U.S. patents and the author of Immersed in the Cave, a self-published book on innovation. Thanks! Thank you for taking the journey to product mastery and learning with me from the successes and failures of product innovators, managers, and developers. If you enjoyed the discussion, help out a fellow product manager by sharing it using the social media buttons you see below. Source
