You’re looking to innovate in product management. What are the most important considerations?

Innovation roots from deep understanding. If we don't have the clarity of what is the need of our customers which is surely different from their want, we can't think of a solution that truly resonates with them. So, its better to do the discovery right, ask questions without any biases, most importantly observe them when they are using your product. Direct engagement offers invaluable insights into the problem space, potentially leading to breakthroughs. Innovation isn't just about crafting complex solutions; it can be as simple as effectively communicating your product's value.

The most important thing for product innovation is to truly understand what your customers need. Talk to them, listen to their feedback, and see how they use your product. Observe more then hearing them as their actions will direct you to right problems. This will help you brainstorm ideas that solve their problems and make their lives easier. By focusing on what customers really need, you'll create a product they love and keep coming back to.

To separate "Want" from "Need" is Key - What is it that the consumer or enterprise Needs not what it Wants. It is the Want aspect that derails the focus from the fundamental and it can only add more to the bells and whistles of a product which may not be a necessity but later on as a nice to have. In adopting the attitude that "let's build them and they will come", yes it does work but it is more of an exception and limited for adoption.

Shipping a great product is a function of having the right understanding of bot problem and solution space. Identifying customer needs can be as simple as observing them use existing products and find the gaps to innovate and work towards that.

For the product innovation it is required to engage in thorough market research, employing techniques such as user interviews, surveys, and data analysis to uncover insights into customer behaviors, pain points, and desires. By empathizing with users and understanding their contexts, product managers can develop products and features that truly resonate with their target audience, ultimately driving satisfaction, loyalty, and business success. Additionally, continuous feedback loops and iterative development processes ensure that products evolve in alignment with changing customer needs, fostering a culture of innovation and adaptation within the organization.

MVP (minimum viable product) is an important milestone and serves as a good reference case which adds to the overall learning within product management process. It helps in validation of what is required in the market and for benchmarking with competitor offerings.

I’ve seen so many managers, captive in their assumptions. They make assumptions instead of talking and listening to the target audience. You must go outside and feel the target audience, listen what they say, and what they don’t say! Then make the conclusions.

Assuming or hypothesizing requires bravery most of the time. Fundamentally our assumptions/hypothesis are having an EQUAL standing with survey and interview results, considered as Problem Statements. So be brave to come up with things and be ready to validate it along with other problem statements. I suggest 1. Build your assumption based on data (even sets of data could have different interpretation among persons) 2. Ensure you have an efficient way to validate your assumption. Simple experiment design will help, minimize the scale to make it cheap and quick. 3. Get the result, don't get attached to our assumptions and move on 4. Keep doing it to reach conclusion

I belive strongly on the importance of this step. Validating assumptions is essential to: - Mitigate risks, - Optimize resource allocation, - Improve product-market fit, - Enhance user experience, and - Enable data-driven decision making. It helps ensure that your product is viable, valuable, and well-aligned with customer needs and expectations.

In the quest for innovation in product management, 'Validate Your Assumptions' through the 'Assumption Testing Framework'. Before fully committing resources to a new idea, conduct experiments, prototype testing, and market validation to ensure your hypotheses about customer needs, market demand, and product viability hold true. This iterative approach minimizes risk and ensures that your innovation efforts are grounded in reality, not just intuition. Validating assumptions early on can save time, resources, and guide you toward solutions that truly meet market needs and drive growth.

Na minha experiência, a melhor forma de conseguir lidar com as cobran?as é trazer os stakeholders para perto. Muitas vezes a desconfian?a que eles tem a respeito do que está sendo realizado na verdade n?o é sobre o trabalho em si e, sim, sobre a falta de visibilidade

Involve Stakeholders Align Early & Often: Brief key stakeholders (executives, marketing, sales) on your user needs, proposed solutions, and validation results early in the innovation process. Address Concerns: Openly discuss potential roadblocks and address stakeholder concerns to gain buy-in and secure necessary resources for development. Transparency & Feedback: Maintain transparent communication, keep stakeholders updated on progress, and actively solicit their feedback to ensure alignment throughout the innovation journey.

Innovation is a team effort, and it's crucial to involve stakeholders from across the organization in the process. Solicit input from colleagues in sales, marketing, engineering, and other departments to gain diverse perspectives and insights. By fostering a collaborative environment where everyone feels valued and empowered to contribute, you can harness the collective intelligence of your team to drive innovation forward.

I don't think 'Involving your stakeholders' is a step in itself. It should be part of every step you take in this process of innovation in product management. From the get-go you should eg get executive support to start your research.

Keep your stakeholders involved including your team, leaders, and users. Listen to different opinions to make sure you're considering all perspectives.

Embrace a culture of continuous learning and experimentation within your organization. Encourage team members to take risks, try new approaches, and learn from both successes and failures. Create space for brainstorming sessions, hackathons, and innovation workshops to spark creativity and exploration. By cultivating a culture that values curiosity, adaptability, and resilience, you can unleash the full potential of your team to innovate and thrive.

?? Cultivate a Learning Culture! Embrace Curiosity: Encourage team members to ask questions, explore new ideas, and seek out learning opportunities. ?? Curiosity fuels innovation and keeps teams adaptable. Promote Experimentation: Create a safe space for experimentation and risk-taking. ??? Encourage trying new approaches and learning from both successes and failures. Provide Feedback: Offer constructive feedback and recognition to foster growth and development. ?? Celebrate achievements and support individuals in areas where improvement is needed. Share Knowledge: Facilitate knowledge sharing and collaboration among team members. ?? Encourage cross-functional learning and exchange of best practices. B

Building on the previous points, I believe it's crucial not to shy away from taking small risks and embracing failure. Just as in real life, avoiding risks often leads to limited progress. Additionally, there shouldn't be a fear of reporting negative results to managers and leadership. They value insights into what doesn't work for users as much as successes. This information is equally valuable for guiding future decisions and improvements.

Acompanhar mídias sociais, influenciadores digitais e os aspectos culturais étnicos geográficos s?o também muito importantes para suas métricas.

It's okay to make mistakes. Learn from them, and always try to get better. Create an environment where everyone sees mistakes as chances to grow.

I have found the adoption of agile practices to be one of the attributes of high performing teams. Agile practices using frameworks such as scrum has helped development teams to be more efficient and collaborative during product development process. These benefits seen in the practice of scrum as one of the frameworks in agile, hinges on empiricism; which asserts that knowledge comes from experience and making decisions based on what is known. This core principle of scrum (empiricism), allows teams to be transparent, observant, adaptive and most importantly stay productive during product development process.

"Rome was not built in a day", similarly, break your work into small parts and focus on one thing at a time. This helps you adapt quickly based on feedback and changing needs.

Agile correlates closely with speed, sounds SCARY at first! But actually it's counterintuitive, by trying things through small changes (smaller scope, quicker development cycle) and acquiring data in between, actually could give PMs clearer view what to do next. Since PMs live in the stressful dark place most of the time with all the unknowns, ambiguities, and uncertainties, incoming data will act as illumination. The more we get, the brighter it is. Also, LESS SCARY it will be. I recommend to fellow product management professionals to do this agile excercise, if not used to it will be a whole new stage & speed BUT there will be less stress for your roadmapping journeys ahead :)

Blindly following Agile will likely cause issues and friction. Product teams should think through how their organization best works and operates. Could be part agile, part waterfall, something else. It’s all about progress over perfection. If we’re perfecting every user story, we are not going to be innovating.

Adopting agile practices can accelerate the pace of innovation and increase responsiveness to market changes. Break down large initiatives into smaller, manageable tasks and iterate rapidly to deliver value incrementally. Embrace principles such as cross-functional collaboration, iterative development, and customer-centricity to foster agility and drive innovation across your organization.

Innovation is a collaborative effort, especially in the context of building great products. Innovation requires diverse set of ideas coming into picture, so be exposed to as many ideas as you possibly can be. Being in a silo will be therefore counterproductive for product innovation. Additionally, learning from others will also help you minimize damage/mitigate risks better as you will be able to vicariously learn from the experiences of other players in the product space - it'll give you a jist of things that truly are fundamental for innovation to be successful, and things that are to be definitely avoided.

Inova??o, por defini??o, é "introduzir novidade em; fazer algo como n?o era feito antes". E isso quer dizer que voltado ao meio que se encontra, ou seja, você pode inovar olhando uma experiência que teve em um produto físico e aplicar em seu produto digital! Já parou para pensar nisso? Como você teve o atendimento em uma loja conceito no shopping, pode te dar ideias em como atender seu cliente no chatbot do seu produto, e assim por diante. Esteja aberto a olhar o todo e transpor experiências que vivencio para seu cliente e n?o esquecer que inovar n?o é nada de absurdo, é fazer diferente do que se fez até aqui.

As you learn from others however (specifically competitors), don't blindly assume that they were right in the way they solved their problem or approached their market. Their success was likely influenced by more factors than you can identify on the surface. It's important to understand their path and approach but don't assume the same will work for you and your product.

"Others" is a very vast arena, including "other colleagues", "other competitors", "other markets", and could even be "other countries" in some international cases. I believe that the main merit is: when there's a will, there's a way. If someone is determined to learn, they will, but also must be determined to innovatively build upon what was learned, and also be broad-minded to accept the differences that may be available.

Don't operate in a vacuum; seek inspiration and insights from peers, industry leaders, and external sources. Attend conferences, join networking groups, and participate in online forums to connect with other product management professionals and learn from their experiences. Look beyond your industry for inspiration, drawing insights from diverse domains and disciplines to fuel your innovation efforts.

Remember the core of what problem your product is trying to solve. If there is a gap between the value proposition and the user's core need, even the brightest of innovative ideas might not fly

Interestingly, I might do some of the activities listed here, but the most important thing I would do is make sure I maintain a forward-looking mindset that prioritizes evolving user needs. While you need to research market trends and user behavior deeply, understanding future demand requires you to look far enough into the future to allow yourself to work back. For that, I would use foresight techniques like scenario planning or backcasting to give me a full view of anticipated future market changes and or shifts in user behaviors. (e.g. search vs. LLM usage). Once I have a working list, I would experiment, experiment, experiment with the goal of getting a lot of “base hits” instead of hoping for the “homerun.”

Product Innovation for the sake of it, is one of the most dangerous things in business or PM. More than just churning out the next innovative thing, it's important to focus on customer use cases, end-end experience, problem statements and solutions. That may result in a micro-innovation or a major innovative change, and at times it may just be doing the plain obvious. There are enough examples of multi-billion dollar business and companies build on being fast followers !

Fail fast is a great philosophy - don't overthink it, get started, work quickly, validate and be ready to move forward to next iteration quickly or make the call to kill it early. Exhaustive research, engaged stakeholders, and having all-star team can still lead to investing too much only to find later you should have abandoned the product sooner. Organizations with an R&D culture and large R&D budgets to match can sometimes afford failures and glean great insights to iterate on to new, better initiatives. For small organizations, especially start-ups, fail fast works.

Innovation is usually a by product of solving a problem with an out-of-box thinking approach. But what does this mean in practise? 1. Start with a well defined problem statement. It is generally harder to innovate if it is an exploratory mission without a problem. 2. Gather all the necessary information about the problem. 3. Brainstorm with experts and experienced folks from different domains to get a fresh perspective. Be open to exploring new and non-traditional ideas. 4. Define your risk tolerance and get comfortable with calculated risks. Embrace rapid testing and experiment on a small scale. 5. Learn from the experiments, refine or redefine the approach and repeat.