By John Mansour
“We’ve created an innovation team.”
Oh, great! Just what every product manager needs – more shiny new objects competing for the same resources that should be going toward product improvements needed years ago.
Innovation is great, but too many organizations define innovation to be synonymous with new products. And that generally leads to expectations that over promise and under deliver.
Innovation is most successful in organizations that see it as an end result, usually falling into one of three categories:
- Finding a new way to solve an old problem because of a new method or process.
- In 2005, BarCamp became a new way to put on a conference that ensured session topics of greatest interest to the participants.
- Technology advances that enable new ways to solve old problems.
- GPS location services on mobile devices that make a host of things easier for businesses and consumers.
- Uncovering needs people didn’t realize they had until there was a solution, then it became all the rage!
- DVRs in the United States, circa 2000.
How do these organizations consistently arrive at end results that are innovative? It’s a mindset, and it doesn’t start with looking for problems. It starts by understanding what your target customers are ultimately trying to accomplish and the obstacles standing in their way.
Since big data is such a hot topic these days, I’ll throw some love to a small technology company in Atlanta, GA – Emcien – that has taken a very innovative approach to big data.
Most companies hawking big data solutions are touting better ways to organize the data. They make it easier to ask complex questions of the data and get answers that offer better insights to running the business. It’s a strong value proposition.
Emcien has come at big data from a completely different perspective that goes something like this: “Your big data is so big you don’t even know what you don’t know. So stop asking the data questions and let it give you answers to questions you’d never think to ask.”
Emcien’s solution is predicated on pattern recognition. It finds patterns in the data you wouldn’t dream up on your best day. Talk about valuable insights! Emcien’s founder understood the ultimate goal of mining big data – tell me something useful and insightful I’d never think to look for that will ultimately help grow the business more profitably. That’s innovation!
A Simple Solution for Product Management
B2B companies don’t realize how easy it is to build innovation into their product management discipline (which may go beyond the product management department). It’s a matter of dedicating part of that discipline (10-20%) to understanding the goals of their target customer organizations from top to bottom and the biggest roadblocks preventing them from meeting those goals. With that level of domain expertise in hand, the other 80-90% of the team responsible for the products can deliver solutions that hit the bulls-eye every time.
Innovation teams don’t have to be a nightmare for product management if they’re integrated in a manner that aligns the goals for the entire portfolio to the goals of its target customers. When that alignment occurs consistently, your organization experiences more profitable growth because everyone shares a common mission – the profitable growth of your target customers.
John
Tweet this: The 5 scariest words a Product Manager can hear – http://wp.me/pXBON-3XT #prodmgmt #innovation
About the author
John Mansour is a 20-year veteran in high technology product management, marketing and sales, and the Founder of Proficientz, a services company focusing on product portfolio management.