Innovation - Diamonds in the rough

If you genuinely want to realise the value of your platform then you need to innovate. What does that really mean? Well, it means testing a range of hypotheses and seeing what sticks.

The trap for young players is that we get attached to our ideas. We're so sure they're viable, that we're onto the right solution or that everything would be grand if they would just use it.

Don't get attached to your ideas.

Only a few ideas are good ideas

What do Penicillin and Scotchguard have in common? They were both discovered by accident as byproducts of attempting to achieve something else. Sir Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin when he threw out an experiment then noticed that mould in the contaminated Petri dish was dissolving the bacteria around it.

When you start innovating on your platform, you're moving into uncertain territory, and as this isn't an exact science, you should expect some ideas not to succeed.

If it's not working, then rather than burn more time and money trying to fit a square peg in a round hole, you are better to call it, take the learnings and apply them to your next big idea. Investing your energy into the next idea, while taking the lessons from the last, is a better use of everyone's time.

I met Ash Maurya , author of Scaling Lean , at a book signing a few years back. His inscription in the book makes this point perfectly: 'To Shane, love the problem, not your solution! Ash'.

Choosing your favourite child

There are hundreds of great books on the topic of innovation* so I've decided to focus here on a technique I picked up for prioritising your ideas rather than executing on them.

*If you want a recommendation for a practical innovation book, check out Innovator's Playbook by Nathan Baird .

This looks like putting a case for each of your ideas on paper, then pitching them to your executive sponsor and see which one resonates best. You might ask why you'd go to all this effort when these are just ideas? I believe it forces you to consider whether an idea is really that good. When you pitch it, you want your exec sponsor to buy into you spending time on an idea, prepared that it might not work.

Let’s break it down into two steps:

Step One: Getting your idea down

Have you heard of Amazon's customer-centred 'working backwards' process? Essentially it proposes that you start with the end in mind and work backward. Their process involves writing a press release as if you'd just launched the innovation. If you've never worked in media or marketing and thus never penned a press release, never fear. Ian McAllister, a Director at Amazon, shared the process on Quora.

In the post, McAllister shared an example outline . Since then, several templates have appeared online. Most of them are good and follow the same standard format, but because they focus on a product and not a platform, I think they fall slightly short on suitability for platform teams.

They seem to miss measurable outcomes, the metrics that we'll use to prove if the innovation meets the targeted need. (Otherwise, how will you know to let it go?) And they don't recognise that platform teams often need to collaborate with other teams and departments to deliver value.

Here's my interpretation of Amazon's Press Release approach to customer-centric innovations.

1. Heading: Name the product you just shipped; something punchy that your target end-user or customer will understand.
2. Subheading: Describe the stakeholder group and the benefit to them. Keep it to one sentence.
3. Summary: Give a summary of the innovation and its benefits. This should be a statement, not a feature list, for example, 'Ensures no application for open roles is missed, regardless of the channel by which it was submitted.' It can be more than one sentence but keep it brief. Write it assuming that the reader won't read any further.
4. Problem: Describe the problem your innovation solves. How does it make your stakeholder more successful? What can users now do better or more efficiently?
5. Solution: Describe how your innovation solves the problem AND how you know. This is one of the gaps I talked about earlier. If you run the experiment, how will you know, with data, whether it was successful? What new behaviour can you measure that proves it meets the need? Another way to think about this might be, 'If we launch this, what will the user do differently from today?'
6. Quote from your sponsor: A spokesperson's quote describing why the team took on this challenge and how it improved the user experience. Include here what it took in terms of collaboration to get the job done and what challenges you overcame to make the innovation successful. Did you have to work across geographies? Were there legal implications to consider?
7. How to get started: Describe how easy it is to adopt.
8. Customer quote: Share a quote that provides a stakeholder view of how this product made them successful or made something easier. Be sure to note the type of user and their role. Include how the innovation fits into their day-to-day and how their experience has improved. Avoid feature specifics and go for aspirational statements like 'increased commission' or 'more time with family.'
9. Closing and call to action: Wrap up your case and direct the reader on what to do next. Should they download an app or register their interest on a URL?

Other thoughts:

Write this so your Grandma could understand. It shouldn't be a specification for the design; remember, a press release is a marketing tool.

Keep it brief. If you want to take your stakeholder through a few of these, keep them to a maximum page and a half length.

Step Two: Deciding which horse to back

Once you have thought deeply about your best ideas and how you might pull them together, it's time to pitch the ideas. At first, do this with your team to ensure there are no obvious gaps and practice driving home the benefits. Then move to your executive sponsor or key stakeholders. Which idea gets them most excited?

The benefit of this approach is that it opens up your innovation agenda to ensure executive support and sets you up as a thought leader, thus changing your status from service provider to an advisor.

This is just one of the popular product management tools that I’ve adapted to platform teams in my book The Platform Owner’s Guidebook: How industry experts unlock the value of enterprise software .