David Fradin is a globally respected product management leader and the founder of Spice Catalyst, known for his expertise in guiding companies to develop and launch successful products.
With a background that includes being classically trained at Hewlett-Packard and later recruited by Apple, David played a pivotal role in bringing the first hard disk drive on a personal computer to market and served as the Apple /// Business Unit Manager—operating at the same executive level as Steve Jobs.
In his conversation with Trisha Stetzel, David reflected on his extensive experience in the tech world and shared lessons learned from leading product teams across some of the most influential companies in the industry. He emphasized the crucial role of customer focus, strategic planning, and cross-functional collaboration in creating market-leading products. 
David introduced his proprietary SPICE framework—which stands for Strategy, Processes, Information, Customer Understanding, and Execution Competency—as a comprehensive guide to achieving product success. Through real-world examples, he demonstrated how companies can either flourish or fail depending on how well they understand and serve their customers.
David also discussed the importance of employee training in product development, underscoring how tools like his SPICE framework help teams align more effectively and avoid common pitfalls. As the author of Building Insanely Great Products, Organizing and Managing Insanely Great Products, and the Wiley-published Successful Product Design and Management, he offers both strategic insights and practical guidance.
His books and training courses, used by global companies like Cisco, continue to impact thousands of professionals worldwide. Driven by a simple but powerful mission—to help products succeed—David Fradin remains one of the most trusted voices in product leadership today.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidfradin
Website: https://www.spicecatalyst.com
This transcript is machine transcribed by Sonix.
TRANSCRIPT
Intro: Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studios in Houston, Texas. It’s time for Houston Business Radio. Now, here’s your host.
Trisha Stetzel: Hello, Houston. Trisha Stetzel here bringing you another episode of Houston Business Radio. Today’s guest is David Fradin, president of Spice Catalyst and a product management leader whose mission is simple to help products succeed. Classically trained as an HP Product Manager, David was later recruited by Apple, where he brought the first hard disk drive on a PC to market and served as Apple’s business unit manager at the same executive level as Steve Jobs. He’s the author of Building Insanely Great Products and Organizing and Managing Insanely Great Products, and the widely published successful Product Design and Management. Over his career, David has trained companies like Cisco Worldwide, sharing proven strategies for building products that customers love. Today, he’s here to discuss the five keys to product success. David, welcome to the show.
David Fradin: Glad to be with you.
Trisha Stetzel: Super excited about having you on. So can we learn a little bit more about David? So tell me a little more just about you and then let’s dive into the work that you do.
David Fradin: I was born and raised in Detroit, Michigan. Uh, went to, uh, University of Michigan in aerospace engineering. Uh, was a pilot at that time. We didn’t have a flying club. So I started the University of Michigan fliers, which is going on today. They’ve trained over 5000 pilots. And chances are, at least one of the pilots that my club trained flew you in one of the airlines, uh, over the past 50 years. And then, uh, I was asked to start a national student organization in favor of an American supersonic transport, and found myself and my sophomore year in college, testifying before the House Aeronautics and Astronautics and Aeronautics Space Committee in Washington, D.C., and going to meetings at the white House and my pink polyester suit. Uh, this is about the time John Travolta made it popular. And, uh, then, uh, when I graduated in interdisciplinary engineering, I couldn’t find a job. So I kept the fast organization going, changed the name to Federation of American Supporting Science and Technology, moved its offices to DuPont Circle in Washington, D.C., which has been in the news lately. And, uh, then, uh, after I decided I couldn’t be a student anymore and lobbying Congress for the space shuttle, for which I was successful at lobbying Congress for Project independence to avoid the energy issues we’re facing today, for which I was totally unsuccessful.
David Fradin: I was recruited to go to Minnesota, uh, to head up the Environmental Balance Association of Minnesota. And, uh, that resulted in two things. One is I was one of the first, uh, environmental mediators using the process of mediation to resolve economic, environmental and energy disputes. And the second thing is that I realized that I never want to see a snowflake again, uh, unless it’s in my martini. That I got involved in being on the, uh, policy steering committee for a former, uh, at that time, a US congressman, uh, Al Quie running for governor, and, uh, was asked to take over as his campaign manager. Uh, we were behind by 20 points when I took over with three weeks to go, and we won by ten points. And John Connally liked that. And so John asked me if I would, uh, be the campaign manager for his Minnesota portion of his presidential campaign, which I was, and we did four times better in Minnesota than he did in New Hampshire. Uh, we got, uh, 4% of the vote in Minnesota. He got 1% in New Hampshire. And then, uh, Hewlett Packard recruited me to come to California to, uh, handle their siting issues, uh, for new, uh, HP manufacturing facilities.
David Fradin: And when I joined the, uh, the HP PR department, I was astonished that they did not have word processing. Uh, this was 1980, when I had been using word processing all the way back to my first organization. Uh, so I introduced word processing from an internal word processing program on an HP minicomputer, which turned out to be a sort of inside product management job. And one of the wonderful things about HP is you could transition laterally. So I transitioned from there into office systems, uh, with a uh, uh, executive report writer on top of a relational database. And, uh, then Apple recruited me to bring the first hard disk drive to market, as you mentioned earlier. It was enormous in size. It was a five megabytes, and it was very cheap. It was only $3,500. And nobody could ever understand why they would need more space than 143kB on their floppy disk. So they noticed that I knew how to manage, and they asked me to take over the, uh, the Apple II product line as the group product manager. And then, uh, uh, about 2 or 3 weeks in, Steve Jobs convinced the executive committee to cancel the product line, and I’ll tell the rest of the story later at the end of the podcast.
Trisha Stetzel: Okay. I can’t wait. Can we fast forward. I’m just kidding. I’m kidding. Well, you’ve had so much experience in, um, product launches and even groundbreaking product launches like, uh, with HP and Apple that you just gave examples of. Can we talk about the five keys to product success?
David Fradin: Well, I found through my experience over the last 55 years of bringing, uh, new organizations, new products and services to market, uh, over 75 of them, uh, that, uh, the five keys of product success is summarized as a pneumonic in my company’s name, spice catalyst. Uh, the five letters of spice. So the S stands for a product market strategy, which I urge, uh, organizations and companies and individuals to write first before they start spending their money on development. And that product market strategy helps you understand who you’re building this product for, what it is that they want to do. What’s the competition like? What’s the key value proposition that all the other elements of a product strategy like pricing support, service training and so forth, uh, the personas of who you’re targeting, your target market, uh, your, uh, total available market, the total market, and so forth. So you should have that all defined takes about 3 to 6 people months to get that done. Uh, but many, many companies don’t do that. And they follow, uh, Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk’s, uh, uh, product path to failure of to, uh, act fast, break things and fail quickly, which includes all of social media and democracy worldwide by enabling the spread of, uh, lies, uh, much more easily. So the p that in spice is repeatable processes. I had a client that had come out with five products.
David Fradin: They all failed in the marketplace. I asked them if they had repeatable product development processes. They said no. And the VP of Product Management of that company said that just resulted in a culture of blame where the product introduction, failure, wrap up meetings, everyone would sit in a circle and point fingers at the others rather than climbing up the maturity curve that I think was either Harvard or MIT. Uh, right about the I is having the information necessary to make informed decisions. The C is understanding your customer. And this is probably the most important part. So understand what is that your customer wants to do, why they want to do it, when they want to do it, where they want to do it, how they want to do it, what’s standing in their way? How important is it for them to get that thing done, and how satisfied are they with the current solution? And then lastly, the E is to ensure that you have within your organization, uh, both employees and Is and consultants. The 130 competencies or skill sets necessary for product success. And if you don’t, then what you should do is put together an assessment program to figure out what you do have, and then a training program to enhance and add those additional skill sets necessary for product success. So that’s the whole spice. Five keys to product success.
Trisha Stetzel: Wow. It really simplifies everything. Um, strategy. Total sense. You got to have your strategy before you start looking at your repeatable processes for what you’re going to go build or do, gathering the information and making sure that you’re, you know, your customers. So I’d like to focus on that if that’s okay, because I think, um, the audience and many people that I talk to forget to know their clients. They build this beautiful product and they go out and say, everyone’s going to buy it, because I think it’s amazing. Yet they have no idea who they’re selling it to. So what role does understanding that customer really play in product success?
David Fradin: It’s what makes 100% of the role. If you don’t understand who your customer is, your chances for failure are probably pretty close to 100%. Uh, I joined a company that my uncle was the investment banker on, and they were trying to develop a computer workstation, which was the follow on to the personal computer and a page layout program like PageMaker or Interleaf. Uh, and also a CAD program like Autodesk, all within a company that only had a few million dollars. So they’re trying to do what Interleaf and Adobe and Sun Microsystems and AutoCAD were all doing, spending billions of dollars to get it done. Uh, so they threw the product out in the marketplace, wasn’t selling very well, hired me to turn it around, And I went out and I interviewed the 20 customers that they had and found that they were using it for what they called assembly instructions, or manufacturing instructions, where you had these drawings incorporated in your text, explaining to the people on the shop floor how to build the product. But if the revision of the product usually would be electronics was changed. You had to quickly update those assembly instructions, otherwise you’d be building stuff that was later destined for the garbage bin. Uh, so I reoriented the positioning of the product, the marketing, the sales to focus on, uh, manufacturing instructions. Uh, and we had success for several years. Uh, but then they refused to account for, uh, upcoming releases of Microsoft Office on the Macintosh, which could do many of the same things, not as well, but significantly cheaper. So I left the company at about a year or two later they went out of business. So understanding who your customer is and what it is that they want to do starts with first observing, uh, because people as, uh, Henry Ford and as Steve Jobs have said, people can’t tell you what they need or they want.
David Fradin: The reason for that is that they have to, uh, those customers have to figure out, uh, the problem that they have and define that. Most people can’t figure out what problem they have, and then they have to come up with a solution and then make that suggestion in terms of what it is that they need or what they want. And most people are not capable of doing that. So, uh, Henry Ford, uh, went out on the streets of Dearborn and interviewed people, and they asked he asked them, would you like to have an automobile? And they said, what’s that? And then he asked them, how would you like to have a car? They said, what’s that? And if you relied on big data back then, assuming the internet was around and you checked how many people were searching for the keywords automobile or car. You would have found zero people looking for that, that want or their need. But if you just grabbed a mug of beer and sat on the stoop of one of the many saloons in Dearborn, he would have noticed people beating their horses with sticks to get through town faster. So what they wanted was a faster horse. And maybe they had some influence as to why, when the model T came out, he didn’t call it a automobile or a car. He called it a horseless carriage. So the way you do that is you first observe, then you interview, then you survey. And then if you have big data and analytics available, you use that information to refine the features of your product to do what it is that your customer wants to do.
Trisha Stetzel: So can we just take one step back before that? How do we know who our clients are? How do we know? How do we identify our customers?
David Fradin: Well, you start out with a bottoms up approach. Uh, I’ll give you an example. When, uh, the guy that started Uber, uh, he lived in Los Angeles and I lived there for a while and also traveled there for business a lot. And frequently you would call for a taxi and it would never show up. Did you call them again? And they say, oh, I’ll be there in ten minutes and then it doesn’t show up. Uh, so it was a big problem, uh, getting a taxi. And then when you get to your destination, if you don’t have enough cash. Uh, they didn’t take credit cards back then. Uh, you’re fumbling around, so you had to make sure you had enough cash. An ATM machines had just come on the market. This would be back in the 70s. So, Trevor, I think that’s what his name was. Or Travis noticed a real need for using the intelligence of a smartphone and do all the things, like order that ride. And then when you get to your destination, you just simply get out of the car. You don’t have to fumble for any change. Um. Now, if he was in, uh, Washington, DC or in New York City, uh, and I’ve lived and worked in both places. If you raised your figure to scratch your nose, about ten cabs would line up to pick you up, because the way you hail a cab in those cities is you go like this. Um, and he would have said there is no problem. And therefore, he would never, uh, invented that notion of Uber. Uh, and that’s just him observing himself having a problem and then extrapolating that across the, uh, the potential market and then roll up the personas of those people, uh, into identifying what the total market is, that how much of it can he potentially reach? And that ends up being his, uh, target market?
Trisha Stetzel: Wow. Yeah. Start from the bottom. Bottoms up. Approach. I love that. Thank you. David. Uh, I know people are already curious. They want to connect with you or learn more about what it is that you’re doing. So what’s the best way for folks to reach out or connect with you, David?
David Fradin: Well, they can go to Spice catalyst.com, which is my website, and there are links from there to all of my books, uh, also to my online training courses served up by Udemy and the syllabuses for the training courses that can be delivered in person. Uh, also, I suggest a search for my name on LinkedIn and asked to connect. Uh, or they could go to Amazon and put in my name and they can see links to all of my books.
Trisha Stetzel: Fantastic. And David’s last name is spelled f r a d I n for all of you who are just listening. And if you’re watching, certainly you can point and click on the show notes. I’ll have all of the links out there as always. So, David, can we talk a little bit more about your books and your training? So let’s start with what what what are they and and who do those serve who might be interested in the training, uh, and or the books that you have out there?
David Fradin: Uh, the courses that I offer go through each of the five keys to product success in depth. Uh, my books cover them. Uh, building insanely great products is a little under 200 pages. It goes through the five keys in some depth. The organizing and managing is for the CEO, CXO Group, uh, to tell them how to put together their organization of product success managers to have successful products. And then Wiley published a little pamphlet of mine. It’s only 796 pages, uh, which goes in depth the five keys to Product success, plus more, uh, that goes through many of the skills and competencies, including things like, uh, negotiation, mediation, presentations, networking, uh, persuasion, influence, that type of thing, plus the technical documentation requirements and support service requirements for any product or service. Uh, and then that’s also available on Amazon. Uh, all of them are available uh, worldwide.
Trisha Stetzel: Spice catalyst you guys. Spice catalyst comm. So go check it out. David, um, you’ve trained team. You mentioned leadership, and it sparked a question. You’ve trained teams, um, at companies like Cisco around the world. What common mistakes do you see these product leaders make? And how do your five keys help prevent them?
David Fradin: Uh, they fail to, uh, understand what it is that their customer wants to do. Uh, they’ve gone to market before. They’ve written their product market strategy, which tells them where they should be focusing their resources. And the product market strategy also lays the groundwork for the messaging used in the social media, the Of advertising, the public relations, the presentations, the sales pitches, which is put together by the marketing department and that is based on the market product market strategy. If you don’t have that, then they have to go out and invent the whole thing from scratch.
Trisha Stetzel: That sounds like hard work. And marketing is a big deal, right? We build the product, we have the right customers. How do we get it in front of them? We have to market and advertise to get it there. Absolutely.
David Fradin: Um, you written the personas of who you’re targeting. Uh, in addition to asking them what it is that they want to do, you also ask them, who are they? Uh, where do they get their information from? And if you know where they get their information from, then that’s where you go and put your marketing messages. If they go on, uh, Twitter, then you go on Twitter. If they go on, uh, Instagram, then they go on Instagram? If they go to the newspaper, then you put your ads in the newspaper. I don’t think the newspapers anymore, but whatever.
Trisha Stetzel: Online newspapers, it’s sort of the same. You just can’t touch it unless you’re using your mouse, right?
David Fradin: Wash your hands afterwards.
Trisha Stetzel: Oh, that’s absolutely true. I’m one of those people. I loved reading newspapers, and the print would get all over my hands. I don’t know what it is. Something about me. Um. I like to focus a little more on the E in spice. You talked about, uh, employees and the idea of doing assessments or diagnostics and then building training around that. Can you talk a little bit more in detail around, uh, what makes that piece successful and how it should be run?
David Fradin: Well, I suggest a three step repeating process. The first step is an evaluation of the skill sets and competencies of each of your employees, and identifying where the weaknesses are. That put together a year long training program to strengthen those weaknesses and then repeat the same assessment at the end of the year, put together additional training and keep repeating. It’ll take 3 to 5 years to get everybody up to stuff, but then you’ll have a dynamite organization in which you could bring any product or service to market and have success with it.
Trisha Stetzel: Mhm. So David, with all of your experience, tell me about the transition from doing all of this work for others and transitioning into your own business. Own business and training companies versus you being a part of that company.
David Fradin: Well, uh, the primary difference is to find those customers, uh, and hopefully, uh, I try to employ pull marketing, uh, where they come to me and say, hey, I’ve got a problem. Uh, can you help me out or. Hey, I want to get my organization assessed, and I want a training program customized to put together just for them. Uh, so I’ve done that for companies like Diebold and, uh, GameStop. Uh, and, uh, I’ve trained people everywhere from Capital One bank, uh, to the Botswanian telecommunications company, which is in Africa. And I went to Botswana. And the reason I went there is I was wondering how it was possible to have a country north of South Africa.
Trisha Stetzel: That’s very interesting. And what a great reason to go there after all. I love that. Um, as we get to the back end of our conversation, I’ve been waiting this whole time for you to finish your story about the Apple three, uh, product launch that was canceled, I think you said so. Can we hear the rest of the story?
David Fradin: Uh, no. The product was already in the marketplace. The first product manager was a fellow by the name of Steve Jobs, and he started up like he did with his later computers. And, uh, Steve was having his Macintosh developed. This is back in 1983. And he thought if he could get the Apple three out of the marketplace, that he would have room to run with his back, which he had not yet introduced. Uh, so he convinced the executive committee to cancel the product line. And a couple three weeks later, I was walking out of the Executive Office building on Mariani. Mariani Avenue in Cupertino. And Ida Cole, who was the director of marketing for the Division I was in, ran out and grabbed me and said, John wants to talk to you. And I said, John who? And she said, John Sculley, the president. I said, oh, yeah, I met him a couple of times. So she ushered me into this little conference room off to the side of his office, and John was sitting at the end of the table and I sat down across from me. On my left was Joe Graziano, the chief financial officer for the company, who later went on to be the CFO at Sun Microsystems and helped them grow and then came back to Apple and Kitty corner. For me diagonally was Dell Yocum, the VP of manufacturing who later went on to become president of Apple. And Sculley is sitting there looking at a super Visicalc spreadsheet, and he looks up from that and says to me, Dave, uh, uh, we’ve got a problem.
David Fradin: We’ve got, uh, $30 million worth of piece parts, uh, this canceled Apple II product line that you’re the group product manager for. Uh, and they’re spread out from Singapore to Dallas to Cork, Ireland. What should we do? And I said, what do you mean we, paleface? And he didn’t get the joke. So I explained to him that back in the 50s and 60s. And then in the 80s, there was a guy by the name of the Lone Ranger, and he always did good. He had a wore a black mask, rode a white horse called trigger who was buried next to him now and had a silver revolver with a silver bullet or something like that. Only one silver bullet, which you only would use in special occurrences. And he was galloping through the desert of Arizona, and he and his Indian sidekick Tonto got surrounded by 10,000 yelling, screaming Indians. Now, when I tell this story to people from India, I have to explain. I’m talking about American Indians, not Indians. Right? The Lone Ranger turns to Tonto, says Tonto were surrounded by 10,000 yelling, screaming Indians and all they want to do is scalp us. Not recognizing the Tonto was an American Indian. And Tonto says, what do you mean we paleface? Scully snickered. The other people laughed and I said, you know, um. And I explained to him that if I wanted to do a promotion to get increased Apple II sales, I had to take it to a marketing communications department in my division, who took it to a similar department at corporate, who took it to, uh, the sales organization, who took it to the sales force, who in turn took it to the principals of the manufacturing rep firms or distributors that we are using, who then took it to the salespeople that called on the dealerships, who then took it to the principal owners of the dealerships, who then took it to the sales manager, the dealerships, who then took it to the salesperson on the floor, which would meet the prospective customers coming through the door.
David Fradin: And I said, you know, John, when I started here at Apple a little over a year ago, I went to work on weekends at a local computer store in Fremont to understand what’s happening at that other end of the trans transaction, uh, which I was encouraged to do by the courses I had at, uh, HP University. And I said, you know, for me to effect a promotion that actually has any influence. And by the way, none of this information I was putting out is the group product manager was reaching any salespeople on the floor in the dealership. And I said, you know what? It’s like pushing a wet noodle. He snickers. He says, well, what should we do about it? I said, give me the authority commensurate with responsibility. If you go back to the beginning of the position of product manager, it started in 1932 at Procter and Gamble.
David Fradin: It’s called a brand manager. And they had full authority. They had the budget for the advertising, the PR, the market research, uh, and the sales, uh, materials to trade the sales force and so forth. But that’s all been stripped away from the product manager. Give it back to us and we’ll get these things sold. He said, okay, make me a proposal. So I got about 70 some people in the company to contribute information, and a core group of like 7 to 12 of us wrote a 80 page business plan covering the all the sales, all the marketing, uh, all the engineering, everything except manufacturing, which we didn’t have to worry about. And then on July 15th, 1983, I presented these business, the Business Plan, with alternatives to the executive committee. Uh, and, uh, we had come up with five alternatives, and one of them was to do what the executive committee had decided, and that was to shut down the product line. And another one was something that I believe very strongly in. And that is let the market decide when the product should be ended. Uh, when the sales stopped, that’s when you end the product. Otherwise you eliminate what the Boston Consulting Group called a few years later. The cash cow. Right. So the key part of the meeting, Floyd Quam, who is the vice president of marketing and sales at the time, says, Dave, if you get a call from a dealer and, uh, we decide to let the product go on or we decide to kill the product, what would you say? Keeping in mind that the back of the room was a lady by the name of Ann Bowers, who had married Bob Noyce at Intel several years earlier.
David Fradin: And she was consulting with Apple at the time on, uh, human resources, on HR. And she was the VP of HR, and she had instituted several years earlier an effort to put together and write Apple values, which was based upon Intel’s values, which was based upon HP’s values, the HP way. And those values included things like empathy for our customers, achievement, individual performance, team spirit, quality, excellence, and most importantly, good management. And everybody knew that the arbitrary canceling of the Apple three and taking a $30 million loss and screwing our 50,000 Apple three customers out there by saying thank you for your loyalty, but we’re not loyal to you would be the wrong way to go. So I said, Floyd, if you let the product continue, I let the market decide. I’ll tell the dealer that. And so long as you continue to sell it and support it, we’ll continue to market it and support you. Uh, but on the other hand, you guys decide to shut the product line down. I’ll give the dealer your phone number. Kwame. And they got they got the message that that would that decision would be completely against the values of the corporation, which is the key to the company’s success, to make it valuable companies in the world today.
Trisha Stetzel: Yeah, absolutely. What a great story. David, thank you for sharing that. Uh, as we close, I would love for you to offer some insight to those who may be struggling there in the product, uh, business. And they’re struggling right now. Where do they begin? What’s the first right step they can take today?
David Fradin: Um, look through the elements of the product market strategy and write up those parts that they, uh, haven’t done yet or those that need to be improved or enhanced.
Trisha Stetzel: Um, and take Dave’s training. I’m just saying that’s important, right? Uh, David, thank you so much for being with me today. One more time. How people can find you.
David Fradin: Uh, go to my my website, Spice Catalyst. Com, uh, or connect with me on LinkedIn. Uh, just by searching for my name. Uh, David Fradin. And you can get my books on, on Amazon also by looking for authors by the name of David Fraden.
Trisha Stetzel: Perfect f r a d I n you guys go out and check out David’s website, Spice Catalyst, and go to Amazon. Type in his name and you can find the books that he’s written out there as well. This has been such an amazing conversation today. David, thank you for joining me.
David Fradin: Thank you for having me.
Trisha Stetzel: That’s all the time we have for today. If you found value in this conversation, please share it with a fellow entrepreneur, a veteran or Houston leader ready to grow. Be sure to follow, rate, and review the show. It helps us reach more bold business minds just like yours and your business. Your leadership and your legacy are built one intentional step at a time. So stay inspired, stay focused, and keep building the business and the life you deserve.
Joshua Kornitsky is a fourth-generation entrepreneur with deep roots in technology and a track record of solving real business problems. Now, as a Professional EOS Implementer, he helps leadership teams align, create clarity, and build accountability.
