You want to take your team’s product innovation to the next level. What software should you be using?

Here is the best Ideation software, I have found so far: innovatenow.app From empathizing with customers to gathering game-changing ideas for businesses, products, and services, this tool will supercharge your innovation process.

The ideation thought is what’s most critical, regardless of the ideation tool used. The products that create the most value keep a North Star lens of the job to be done (JTBD). What are the functional, emotional and social jobs? What are the competing methods of solving those jobs? What workarounds are employed to fill remaining gaps? Additionally, it is important to understand the full customer journey, not only the steps taken when engaged with a product or service, but steps pre- and post-engagement. Exploring the activities, environments, interactions, objects and users in each journey step reveals pain points, both explicit and latent. Solving those paint paints in a desirable, feasible and viable way creates value.

In steering product innovation, the choice of tools is crucial, but the approach is paramount. Having led digital transformations for numerous companies, I've found that while various tools can offer support, the key lies in a quick iterative experimentation approach, focusing on MVP (Minimum Viable Product) for ideation. The essence is to engage the right target audience for valuable feedback, and with the right mindset and strategy, even a simple paper and pencil can suffice. Leveraging technology opens up a plethora of tools, but it's the agile mindset that truly propels successful product innovation

Every beginning is hard, so keep in mind: Start Small! Think twice! Don't give up. Share ideas, but carefully with whom you share.

The ideation tools should be easy to use, with a high degree of customization. It’s important to note that tools only are a means to gather ideas and the team should realize that it’s the single source of truth. I find Retable (an Airtable competitor with one time licensing), and Miro to be the perfect solutions for this task.

In my experience I have seen many PMs falling into the trap of creating a high fidelity mock or say full design at the initial stage itself. Always start with pen/paper or a low fidelity mock up via balsamic or any such tool. Remember the idea is to look at the core element of the feature and not how it looks or what the text would be.

Vivenciamos situa??es onde o design da interface, construído por especialistas, foi rapidamente invalidado ao colocar o protótipo para a valida??o do usuário final. Nada como vivenciar a prática antes de escrever uma linha de código. Reduz consideravelmente o investimento e possibilita a entrega de softwares realmente funcionais.

Perhaps the most important step in getting a buy-in is prototyping. Make early prototyping extremely easy so anyone can contribute without the need for any specific skill. Involve potential end-users directly and iterate swiftly. People need to see the solution to believe it so prototype it till you make it! Working prototypes should come later only if there is a good evidence to validate the solution.

In the journey of innovation, many organizations have lost sight of the true essence of prototyping. It's not about creating a polished, fully functioning tool; instead, it's about swiftly crafting a basic model to test ideas. All you need is a mindset and a simple set of tools like paper and pencil. Every idea evolves through constant tweaking, revealing its true purpose, audience, and approach over time. Prototyping isn't just about saving money; it's about wisely allocating resources to test multiple ideas simultaneously and gather constructive feedback. Remember, the first iteration is just the beginning of a journey towards innovation.

When doing initial prototyping, it's a great idea to make your mockups as low fidelity as possible so people don't get tripped up on colors and look/feel. You want to focus on telling the story of the problem you are solving and WHY this solves it, rather than focus on look and feel. Spend time to get the customer problem clearly identified and the narrative of why this solution helps improve the customer's life. Working in a "text only" tool, like MS Word or Google Docs, to document this is a powerful tool. From there, you want to start working on visual items to tell that story. Balsamiq, PowerPoint / Google Slides, and Miro are all great tools to tell that visual story.

Always look for software that tracks the key tasks to be completed. 1.- You can generate a trust index to assess the relevance and risk that a project may carry. 2.- Project communication is also an art and must be detailed in its milestones. 3.- Some software options, where you will find great functionalities, include: - Jira + Confluence - Notion - ClickUp

With nearly 2/3 of digital transformation projects encountering challenges, the choice of project management software is pivotal. Emphasize alignment with project goals and tackle common pitfalls such as scope creep, resource utilization, financial excess, and project deviation. A robust tool, like Jira, known for its simplicity and user-friendly interface with effective visualization, can enforce governance parameters to mitigate these challenges effectively. Again, no tool is fit for all and mostly it depends on your organization's culture, industry and practices.

It doesn't matter. Don't waste time testing out all available products. Be a (good) PM, jot down your own problem statements, and start using the first solution you found that addresses your problems. Invest your time in building, not finding the perfect tools.

Based on my experience, I have employed various project management tools such as Asana, Jira, Excel, Planner, and Trello for overseeing projects of different scales. Jira stands out as the preferred choice due to its capability to seamlessly synchronize with DevOps processes.

Gerenciar um projeto nos dá, principalmente, previsibilidade. Um bom software para gerenciamento de projetos precisa ser flexível e adaptável à realidade daquilo que se pretende entregar ou construir. No mundo de softwares, por exemplo, os processos ágeis s?o mandatórios, mas também podem necessitar de conceitos de gest?o tradicionais.

Your team's innovation capability has nothing to do with the tools they use. The three most important things to enhance your team's innovation capability are 1.Do they deeply understand the problem they're trying to solve? Do they fully understand the context in which their customer is trying to solve that problem? 2. Can they build a better (simpler, more convenient, quicker cheaper etc) solution than the one currently available to their customers 3. How quickly can they learn if the solution they built is actually solving the intended problem or not and to what extent?

True innovation requires radical openness - a willingness to genuinely listen, even when arguments initially offend our reason. For breakthroughs emerge not from echo chambers of confirmation bias, but from synthesizing worldviews that contrast, compete and productively provoke.

Collaboration Software - such as Notion or even Slack - is missing from this list and is highly important to provide transparency into not just a manicured final product but the messy process, which is what often helps innovation . These help in - 1. Connecting with stakeholders, even customers on ideation - sharing documents, prototype videos or screens etc 2. Bouncing ideas around with the team and extended team for instant feedback 3. Asking questions and co creating documents

Innovation will not happen on software, it happens out of office, in the actual context and thick of action. The software serves to facilitate innovation or to simulate, model or build it out. In other words, innovation precedes the product and it's empathy, observation, curiosity and persistent probing that makes it happen. Innovation can very well happen without any software, but the converse cannot.

Process and communication are more important than software. I managed multimillion-dollar programs using tools like SharePoint, and Jira back in 2013. As a leader it's your job to ensure everyone is aware of decisions and standards are being followed without short cuts.