The Product Pulse

"Innovate or Die." It's the current battle cry for businesses trying to get or stay ahead of the competition and remain viable in the market. But how do you avoid innovation for innovation's sake, and instead drive measurable business results through innovation processes and tools?

Birds of a Feather Innovation Leaders Workshop

I learned the answer to that question (and more) at the Birds of a Feather Innovation Leaders Workshop in Chicago a few weeks ago. The event was sponsored by Brightidea and hosted on the Kraft campus. The speakers were great and I especially appreciated their willingness to share what did and did not work in their innovation endeavors. Here's the Cliff's Notes version in four easy steps:

1. Prepare to Innovate!
   Often companies jump right into idea collection with their employees and customers, desperately searching for the next big thing without giving any consideration to organizational preparedness. I think it was Yoda who said: "There is great responsibility in receiving the idea." Okay, maybe it wasn't Yoda, but it sure sounds like him because it is so profoundly true. For successful innovation, it's necessary to ensure the organization:
   1. is in the right mindset (that of problem-solving)
   2. has supporting processes and tools in place
   3. is properly structured/staffed to execute the processes and administer the tools
   4. is culturally prepared to respond.
   Whatever you do, don't skip these steps! It will sink the innovative spirit of the organization and backfire in harmful ways. I'm not saying you need to spend months and years getting ready to innovate; I'm just recommending that you have answers to the above questions to ensure you are equipped to handle and implement the changes innovation programs can bring.
   
   
2. Focus! And Capture Needs BEFORE Ideas!
   There is a time and a place for the electronic employee suggestion box and open innovation. But having a short-term (2-4 week), focused innovation campaign that gives people a specific problem to solve often leads to more valuable results. And by narrowing idea capture down to a specific problem to solve, it's much easier to define metrics (hard or soft) to determine success and benefit.
   
   
3. Brand It, Baby!
   One way to get people excited about driving innovative results is by branding and marketing your innovation tool and specific campaigns. With today's technology, there is no excuse for rolling out a vendor-branded software tool. Presenters at the conference had full-blown advertising campaigns, including videos to explain the objective and generate hype, and logos with associated color schemes to skin the software. Re-branded programs and tools had names like "Think Tank" and "Idea Kitchen" to really capture the attention of idea submitters. Some companies even sponsored specific "Innovation Days" around a particular campaign to encourage involvement and ownership. Don't fall victim to assuming that "if you build it, they will come." (Field of Dreams; not Yoda.) By branding your innovation program, you're sure to drive quality ideas that deliver results… because it is, after all, about the results.
   
   
4. Show Me the Money!
   Sometimes solving a problem and the feeling of accomplishment in contributing to the success of the company is a reward in itself. But for most of us, a little incentive or some recognition for the great, problem-solving ideas we submit goes a long way. You know how it feels when you put thought and effort into something and it seems as if your idea has dropped into a black hole where there is never so much as a reply or simple, "thank you." It sucks. And why would you waste your precious time on something to which management is only giving lip service. Whether feedback comes in the form of public recognition for being a top innovator (that's FREE for all of you penny pinchers keeping track at home) or in the form of a big fat check (option B, please!), it is critical for the success and sustainability of your innovation program to reward good ideas.

So there you have it, Product Pulse Peeps…innovation in four simple steps. Implementing an innovation tool and program isn't hard, but you can't skip any of the steps if you want to drive real results. As it relates to innovation, Yoda would say (and this time, you can look it up!): "Do or do not. There is no try."

There were many great takeaways from my recent 2-day session with Pragmatic Marketing. Their expert team, including John Milburn, a friendly upbeat guy with 20 years of product management experience in the tech industry including long stints at Tivoli and VTEL, has more than 10 years of experience working with over 70,000 professionals globally in product management training.

Let's start with the most important thing: The FOOD at the AT&T Conference center on The University of Texas campus (where the class was held) is excellent! This information is neither here nor there but if you get the chance, check out the conference center or hotel as an option next time you're in Austin.

From a more business-oriented standpoint we learned:

• Product management's primary job is to know and speak for the customer.
  • The following quote (with a few modifications) by Peter Drucker was used multiple times: "The aim of product management is to know and understand the customer so well that the product or service fits him and sells itself."
• Product management's main responsibility is finding their market's problem. To do this, product managers should:
  • Contact customers (both their own and their competitors'), evaluators, and prospects.
  • Use various research methods including discovery (onsite interviews, focus groups, secondary research) and validation (surveys, choice models, experiments).
• Too often product management gets overwhelmed with tactical instead of strategic activities.
  • As Milburn noted in class, if product management doesn't do its job then the other departments will fill the void. Other groups have their own goals and ideas so if the product management team is not there to speak for the customer, an inside out product could result (one that solves a space problem but not a strategic one).
• By focusing on my customers' needs and wants, product managers can help their company build solutions that the market will buy, and what is profit if not the ultimate goal of any company?

After spending two full days getting my head stuffed with information (and my belly stuffed with yummy food), I was raring to go out and apply all these new tips and energy to my job. I was eager to see how much of what I learned in class was applicable to real life.

So far, most of the points ring true. I've spoken with multiple customers about their needs and concerns and gathered a lot of useful information. I have also met a good portion of the executives, sales, marketing, and development teams and worked with them on a hodgepodge of projects. It will be interesting to see how well I remember my role as Chief Customer Advocate once I get inundated with a lot of tactical stuff. I will try my best to focus on strategy, Milburn and Drucker!

I am new to product management, but there were people in my session with years of experience, and we each felt that Pragmatic Marketing taught us something useful. Just goes to show that no matter where you are on your career path, there are always opportunities to better understand the marketplace and your role in it. And, that information is almost as satisfying as the AT&T Conference Center's dessert bar!

It's a notion counter to everything in our marketing bones, but sometimes our obsession for delighting customers can actually be too much of a good thing. From a product portfolio perspective, I wouldn't go quite as far as the recent Harvard Business Review article, "Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers" (Jul-Aug 2010 issue). But this is a serious product development issue: with limited resources, every time a product or service over-delivers on one customer benefit, it increases the probability of under-delivering on another. And lurking in that resource misallocation is vulnerability for your brand.

At the simplest level, over-delivery is providing any customer benefit in excess of what is required to attract and keep customers. So how do you know -- before the product is built (and long before customer satisfaction research sometime after launch)? The answer is quite straightforward if you already score your product development projects in terms of alignment with specific customer benefits (drivers of brand choice that define ideal customer experience -- e.g., easy to use, reliable, etc.) and if you know your current competitive standing on each benefit (e.g., superior to competitors, inferior, or parity).

Armed with those basics, you can look at how all product features on a roadmap (or headed for it) are aggregately aligned with each benefit. When doing this, we often see that the bigger product improvements are on one or more benefits where the company is already the clear leader. Meanwhile, that same roadmap is under-delivering on benefits where competitors are at parity or even ahead. Analyzing total roadmap delivery by benefit also helps prevent over-delivering on, say, the #4 most important benefit to your customers while under-delivering on #1 -- another all-too-frequent outcome without such analysis. 

Human nature: we love doing things we're already great at. But when this happens in excess in product development, the brand often ends up extending its lead on customer benefits that it's already comfortably superior on while opening itself to competitive attacks on other key benefits. So by all means let's delight customers with next year's new products. But let's do it in proportion to the relative importance of each customer benefit and where your brand needs the most help competitively.

Of all the things I expected to get out of last week's Thanksgiving holiday, a lesson that underscores Forrester's concept of 'disruptive renewal' wasn't one of them.

The holiday saw me and my husband at my parents' home. We had rolled in late the night before, said our good-nights and trundled off to bed. 7 a.m. the next morning we were greeted by opera blaring through the intercom system, a holdover from the house's build in the 60s. Good morning, indeed. The fact that I knew to expect this wake-up from many years of experience did not make it any more palatable.

Fumbling for my morning cup of Joe in the kitchen -- center of the house and also location of the main control panel for the intercom -- I was startled to see innovation had sprouted from this thing that had so aurally colored my teenage years. Perched on a small, purpose-built shelf integral to the console was an iPod. The aria that had roused me from my beauty rest was not issuing from a more-often-than-not staticky FM station, but from a selected track on Apple's slick offering.

(This led me to the inescapable conclusion that my parents are hipper than I suspected, which somehow made me feel even older. Mom and Dad are shopping at the Apple store. What's next? Abercrombie and Fitch?)

It brought to mind the Disruptive Renewal report recently issued by Mark Mulligan of Forrester which he blogs about here. In it, he makes the argument that disruptive technology -- connected devices that empower consumers to make all new kinds of choices about how to interact with your products -- can spell the future for your company or ring its death knell.

Forrester calls this disruptive renewal, which it breaks into three stages: that of disruptive empowerment, when new technology enables customers to make choices about how to interact with products; discontinuous change, when they re-evaluate traditional products and expect more from them; and the critical split of transformational innovation or terminal obsolescence, when businesses either react by transforming to meet (or exceed) the expectation -- or fail to do so, and just plain fail.

The power paradigm, as we know, has shifted. What was once the domain of the manufacturer has irrevocably moved to the consumer. Smart vendors -- like the hero of our little tale, the manufacturer of the intercom system -- hear and respond. Those who don't are likely to get outmaneuvered, become sidelined and irrelevant.

Is your company in danger of this? Forrester tells us that that enterprise products are as impacted as consumer products -- you don't shed your expectations as you walk into the office, do you? But in an October 2010 survey of 200+ product strategists, Forrester found that only 26% think their companies are responding effectively to disruptive technology, and only 5% think they are responding highly effectively.

I get it: it's daunting. The power shift. The weeding out the good ideas from the bad. The sheer costs associated with transforming how you respond. But take another look at our hero -- an iPod adaptor, a shelf, a calculated risk that their target demographic and Apple's intersect enough to make it worthwhile (also supported by the Forrester report, by the way), and boom, they've catapulted themselves from 1960 to 2010 and into relevance, and ya gotta think it's worth it, don't you?

Consumer Goods Growth & Innovation Forum Review -- Part 1 of 3

The 2010 Consumer Goods Growth and Innovation Forum just concluded in South Beach on Friday with a big bang… including a spontaneous and refreshing F-bomb from an amazing new innovator. But, more on him in a moment.

This year's conference, produced by CGT, had a theme of New Product Resurgence: Bringing Back the Consumer and Driving Growth. The conference presenters represented a who's who list of consumer product giants, including Kraft, Mars, Colgate-Palmolive, and Kimberly-Clark. They covered a variety of topics on everything from Brand Management to Developing Leadership and Talent. The sessions and personal exchanges amongst the 50+ executive attendees were rich, engaging, and motivated towards sincere, helpful solutions based on real-life experiences.

One of the biggest highlights of the event was the presentation of the Innovation Awards. Some of the winners included the new Liquid Pencil made by Newell Rubbermaid, the new Jeans Diaper made by Kimberly-Clark, and the big, grand prize winner: MooBella Ice Creamery Machines. While all of the attendees were given a Liquid Pencil (I used mine to draft this blog post -- thank goodness it erases!), we were disappointed that there were no MooBella samples to enjoy. (Hint, Hint for next year, Bruce!)

For me, the two presentations that stood out the most were Ben Kaufman, Founder and CEO of Quirky, on Group Think Tank, and Michael Becker of the Mobile Marketing Association on Reaching the Consumer Through Mobile Marketing because they demonstrated the true spirit of innovation, how quickly consumers are maturing, and how rapidly the products game is changing overall.

While Michael Becker's presentation on Mobile Marketing left many furiously adding items to their marketing To Do List (more on him in Part 2 of this Forum Review), I must first share my enthusiasm for the presenter who left my jaw hanging open. Please allow me to introduce to Ben Kaufman:

• Ben started his first company, Mophie, the day he graduated from high school.
• Six months later, Mophie took home the Best of Show award in the innovation category at MacWorld with his invention: the Song Sling for the iPod Shuffle.
• The next year at MacWorld, Kaufman felt like he had to top the previous year's win, so he handed out pencils and notepads to attendees on the trade floor, asking them to come up with new product ideas for the iPod accessories. The crowd delivered with 120 unique ideas. The Mophie gang scanned them in, allowing over 30,000 people from around the world to collaborate to develop a brand new product in 72 hours: the Bevy.
• Ben Kaufman was named the #1 Entrepreneur under 30 by Inc. Magazine in 2007.
• Mophie got acquired around the same time and Ben immediately started his next company, Kluster, to develop the technology platform to gather direct consumer feedback from around the world.
• Based on Kluster's technology, he then founded his current passion: Quirky. Ben wanted to share the thrill of taking a product to market with the world. So every week, ideas are submitted online, the community votes, submits product names, comes up with a logo, and by Friday afternoon a new product is born. Everyone who participates in the process shares in the profit. Killer, huh?
• Oh, and did I mention he's is only 23. He'll turn 24 next month. Happy Birthday, Ben!

Kaufman's keynote presentation covered much of his personal history, which, in itself, is completely inspiring and fascinating. But he had some terrific lessons learned to share with the legendary experts in the room, especially as it relates to innovation and the entrepreneurial spirit. Quirky and Kaufman have tapped into the inventor in all of us. Consumer goods companies can certainly learn a lot about the products consumers want to buy from focus groups and customer satisfaction surveys. But the times… they are a changin'. And I believe that innovators like Kaufman are leading the way on how to do this in a new "quirky" way. (Oh, and yes, Ben was the one who dropped the F-bomb during his presentation. It was classic!)

Part 2: When Is a Phone No Longer a Phone? When It's a Way to Connect with Your Target Market!

Allow me to pose the question again, but this time as a multiple choice question:

How is your company using social media?

1. As a hip way to fill business cards and e-mail signatures with nifty and icons
2. To communicate to employees and customers
3. To transform and broadcast media monologues into social media dialogues (Wikipedia)
4. As a powerful platform to drive new, innovative products into the market

Take a moment to select the answer that best describes your organization. And be honest -- no one's watching. Go ahead… I'll wait.

If you answered "D" and you really, really mean it, allow me to lay down the gauntlet to put your company to the test. My good, wicked-smart friends at Kalypso have issued a challenge for all of you product development companies out there… a competition, in fact. Allow me to introduce you to the first annual Spike Awards to recognize the best use of social media and social computing to improve innovation, product development and product management. Spike Awards will be given to companies in four categories: Technology, Life Sciences, CPG, and Manufacturing. Nominees will be measured on the quality of their responses and how creative their social media solution was in solving the business problem. So, put your money where your mouth is and submit your entry today -- nominations must be in by Friday, September 3, 2010.

Winners will be announced on October 19th at PDMA's Annual Global Conference on Product Innovation Management. This conference always delivers meaty content and presents incredible networking opportunities. And with the presentation of the Spike Award winners, setting the example of how social media can be used to drive innovation into the pipeline, this conference should not be missed! See you there!

About a month ago I participated in the Frost & Sullivan 6th Annual Global Innovations in New Product Development Conference in Anaheim, California, home of that hallowed House of Mouse, Disneyland. Like many of you, I've experienced more conferences, summits, huge trade shows, user conferences, etc., etc., ad nauseam, than I care to remember. Few stand out as exceptional. This event, however, did exactly that.

It began on a high note with a networking breakfast chock-full of leaders of innovation and new product development. Also, Frost & Sullivan did a great job of organizing the event and truly making it interactive. Everyone was a participant, not just an attendee. Sponsors, keynotes, and attendees all came together as equals, eager to share, collaborate, learn, and make new connections.

There was a wealth of content about driving innovation, measuring the maturity level of a company with regards to capturing and managing the voice of the customer, breakout sessions and general sessions that demonstrated what these leaders are doing today to drive innovation and accelerate product development in their organizations.

While many of the presentations I heard were valuable, the one that truly stood out was from Malcolm De Leo, Vice President of Innovation at Daymon Worldwide.

Malcolm is an engaging presenter and has transformed the culture at Daymon Worldwide with his "from Innovation to Activation" approach. With a goal of making Daymon more innovative to drive partnerships, value and ultimately more revenue, Malcolm's approach makes innovation a truly collaborative effort by decentralizing the teams and creating a team of interacting innovators that all have a stake in the process and its success.

The process and culture change he and his team have put into action is unlike anything I have seen before. His innovation strategy is a targeted approach from culture to customer. His vision is to make Daymon the innovation network for all of its partners. A truly visionary approach but a practical one based on the work and videos he shared with the event participants.

I think every organization that really is committed to driving innovation across the enterprise can benefit from the work that Malcolm and his team have accomplished. To connect with him, just visit www.innovationmuse.blogspot.com, www.videobio.com/mdeleo, or www.twitter.com/innovationmuse.

Last week saw me traveling, which means I had some time to do a little airplane reading. I had the July/August edition of the Harvard Business Review with me and read a few thought-provoking articles.

The first is titled "The Execution Trap." A lot of good thoughts but the main thread is that there should not be an organizational hierarchy when it comes to the segregation of strategy and execution. In fact, segregation is the problem -- employees at every level of the organization should feel empowered to drive strategy as well as execution. Strategy should not be the exclusive domain of executives, but should permeate the entire organization. We should all strive to build cultures that promote the extinction of the "choiceless-doer" (author's term), i.e. the individual contributor that simply executes what they are told. Here, here.

The second article, "Stop the Innovation Wars," in some ways takes an alternate perspective. The authors advocate that driving innovation demands the creation of "innovation teams" that are chartered to break new ground. These teams then propagate their innovations into the core operations (or "performance engines") of the firm to bring the innovation to life.

Should innovation be more like strategy as in the first article? Shouldn't innovation exist in every aspect and every employee in the firm? I tend to think so, but there are some examples in the second article that show that the "teams" approach has merit.

Interesting reading, check out these articles if you get the chance and let me know what you think.

Back in May, I was in Boston for the Front End of Innovation Conference, and also to meet with Dr. Brian Glassman, PhD Innovation Management. Battling a head cold from Austin to Boston, the first point of order before racing down to the Seaport hotel was a quick stop for a hot bowl of clam chowder at Fanueil Hall Marketplace. It didn't eliminate my cold, but it helped! I met Dr. Glassman on the exhibit floor and I discovered that he, too, was suffering from a cold. Must have been that time of year.

After we discussed the Advanced Ideation webinar we were working on, the bells chimed and the announcer let us know it was time to make our way into the next General Session. I was excited to attend this particular presentation as it featured Xerox, a Planview Enterprise customer. The presenter was Dr. Sophie Vandebroek, CTO Xerox & President Xerox Innovation Group who presented "Technology Led Innovation, Tapping What's Next."

What stood out in this presentation was the blending of technology with Xerox's actual customers to help drive their innovation process. The company has definitely spent a lot of time framing its innovation processes, not just from using cutting-edge technology to foster innovation, but by very proactively including customers in the innovation process itself. Customers' needs are the main elements in what Xerox positions as "Innovation Domains," which were Knowledge Work, Sustainability, and Personalization. What struck me was the similarity to what today's marketers do: create personas for your audience based on their functional roles within their organizations.

One section of her presentation that has us all laughing and agreeing with was when she showed old videos of users of high-end Xerox printers and copiers. "Imagine that if the machine goes down, there's a second engine that keeps running your job, so you don't have to wait for someone to fix it! You can avoid downtime and still get your job copied." The customers in the video absolutely loved this! Unlike the old "focus group" model, this was an open-dialogue format with Xerox and its customers at the same table, not hiding behind one way mirrors. They were able to gather not only the product wishes, but to test and evaluate new features in a qualitative and qualitative format to help validate new products or product enhancements: all driven from the actual customers who will be purchasing them again! It was also clear that Xerox is a highly mature and leading technology organization that relies heavily on technology and its customer base to drive the innovation process. This approach helps it achieve and defend its market leadership position and ensures it has an extremely robust and powerful product portfolio.

Another take-away from the conference itself: Innovation is HOT! More and more companies are creating innovation centers of excellence and creating new positions for people to "own" define and manage the innovation process. On the last day of the conference I was delighted to met Braden Kelley of Business Strategy Innovation. He shared some great insights about the conference and also gave me a lot to think about for the upcoming Open Innovation Summit in Chicago this August. If you're in R&D, Product Development, or Innovation, you probably already know about his blog, aptly named "Blogging Innovation." You can also find him on Twitter @innovate.

So -- did you attend FEI Boston? If so, I'd love to hear about your favorite Keynote or General Session!

It's no news flash that an agile process -- once set up -- delivers real benefits, quickly, for product management, in terms of collaborative development. The news flash really is that agile brings as much, if not more, benefit to our customers.

One of the most successful programs we have run at Planview gives our customers the ability to participate directly in the agile process -- from the very beginning of user story development, prioritization, sprint demo reviews, and all the way through testing. Most people are visual: when we can show our customers every two weeks how development is progressing in a sprint demo, the feedback and ideas flow continuously and therefore the quality of what we deliver is much higher. Our level of confidence that we are building the right features the right way is exponentially greater with this hand-in-hand customer participation.

The key to success of the program is that we take a good deal of time picking the right customers to participate AND determining the appropriate number of customer for each project. By the "right" customers I mean:

• Do they have the time to participate?
• Do they have in-depth knowledge of the subject -- i.e. passion around the project?
• Are they geographically dispersed so that we have good representation globally?
• What verticals are they in, so that we have a good mix of markets represented?
• Do they represent all the personas we need across the different markets we serve?

The "right" number of customers for each project is determined by the complexity, reach of the feature (is it an element that spans the platform, like the UI, in it one module of the product), and importance of the feature to our business. We have run programs that range from 3 customers all the way to 45.

The internal benefits of the agile methodology have been well documented and blogged about. However, as I see it, the greatest value of agile is external, in that our customers truly become extensions of our product management team.