Lead in a Disruptive Market With Product Innovation Excellence

Innovation and disruption don't happen by accident. Product managers must carefully plan and prepare efforts to innovate and disrupt within their market by following three critical steps, keeping their eyes on a customer-oriented value proposition throughout.

Businesses don’t invest in technology simply for the sake of new technology. Businesses invest in the technology that will drive value and deliver new and potentially differentiating value to their customers, prospects or markets. To ensure that their innovation work fulfills this agenda, product managers must begin the process with a clear understanding of the potential user or customer of the technology. They must clearly understand the future problems to be solved and the value to be delivered. This approach may reduce some innovation through ideas that “fail fast” or have no actual customer, but will actually add value.

Innovation work should follow the same interactive process for mainline product work. Of course, the iterations themselves may be longer, and the criteria and/or ceremonies for exiting those iterations may not look identical to those in other product work. But the principles of inspection, adaptation and validation are critical to the success of innovation work. Regular reviews with not only the product team, but also other business stakeholders and even potential users or customers, hedge the risk of technology innovation gone awry. Involving end users or prospects in such efforts often requires a high level of trust or legal protections like nondisclosure agreements, but the investment is well worth it.

A predictable checkpoint will ensure innovations are responding to customer needs and make other teams aware of the product so it can be used more broadly.

It’s an extremely common story that some technology innovation is explored, proven, refined and made ready for customers, only to find that the marketing and sales teams are disinterested or outright dismissive in actually delivering it outside the company. To avoid this, those working to innovate and disrupt must build an upfront, ongoing partnership with their go-to-market colleagues to seed the value of the innovation. Instead, begin the process not only with an understanding of the value proposition, but with some actual documentation of that value. Innovation teams can significantly reduce bottlenecks and obstacles to bringing their work to market by articulating, demonstrating and positioning their work throughout the process.

There is no one-size-fits-all product management framework or template that fits with every product or organization without a level of customization or configuration. However, product management organizations are often too inwardly focused and don’t look beyond their traditional boundaries and organization to identify innovative approaches being used elsewhere or within other industries.

Proactively integrating innovative practices within the product management processes will improve effectiveness and increase business value.

The performance of the product management team, in terms of both the processes and the team’s approach, should be regularly assessed by the team to identify opportunities to innovate and improve. Comparing performance to established KPIs or OKRs is helpful, but rarely provides enough information to develop any corrective action items.

Retrospectives should be a standard part of the performance review process and conducted on a monthly basis to identify activities based on four categories: What went well? What should we stop doing? What could be improved? What experiments should we try?

Allowing time for retrospection sessions at monthly team meetings is an excellent mechanism for product managers to share and compare their findings with their peers, and to agree on teamwide innovation changes.

Product managers should create a process to collect and assess feedback from key stakeholders. Changes to the product development process should be actively solicited to increase the potential for product success.

Product managers should assess the stakeholders suggestions in terms of potential impact on: Existing workload and timelines, stakeholders outside the product management team and business benefits gained.

Innovation teams are often so focused on technology, they fail to consider customer value. Though the drive to create products incorporating new and emerging technology is valuable, it must be balanced and tempered by the realities of the organization. Marketing, sales and product teams will have a bias for maintaining or improving current revenue streams over introducing new and untested emerging technology, but with the right approach product managers can build trust and drive value with innovation.

Pursuing technology just for the sake of pushing boundaries is exciting work, but it doesn’t always result in the creation of business value. For innovation teams to truly be successful, they must balance the futurism of technologists with the reality of business stakeholders like marketing, sales and product managers. Ultimately, innovation teams are a business unit and must be capable of delivering technology solutions that solve valuable customer problems — even if customers don’t know they have that problem yet.

Product managers seeking to improve the business context of innovation teams should:

• Insert themselves into the innovation process early on to provide business and customer context to balance the technologist bent of the teams.

• Ensure that the innovation teams are focused on solving future customer problems and not just exploring technology for technology’s sake.

• Build customer knowledge and understanding within the innovation team by empowering them with personas, data, and other tools and access to focus on the customer value they intend to deliver.

Product managers looking to leverage a land-and-expand approach to innovation should:

• Start innovation work by focusing on one persona and a small number of use cases.

• Expand the personas and use cases to be supported as a compelling storyline builds through technology exploration.

• Build a library of content that documents the personas, use cases and business value uncovered through the innovation experiments being performed.

The most effective way to persuade core teams to buy into innovative thinking is to take responsibility for some of the customer, problem and solution positioning work ahead of time. Consequently, the barrier to adopt the innovation work is lessened, and “I’m too busy” fails as an objection. Taking on this content creation in an iterative and transparent fashion makes the operationalization of innovation work significantly more likely.

Product managers seeking to implement a program of accountability through content curation should:

• Build an understanding of the importance of documenting business value being created from the beginning with innovation teams.

• Identify a progressively built library of content that not only documents business value that is possible, but also prepares others — both internally and externally — for the eventual launch of the innovation work.

• Use this library of content and progressive creation process to hold innovation teams accountable for focusing on solving future customer problems and not merely exploring technology for its own purpose.

One long-term issue with any technology, regardless of whether it is hardware, software or services, is that users need to learn and adapt to it. This creates barriers and requires significant resources — in terms of time and money — for both users and providers. However, GenAI is highly capable of learning from and adapting to human needs and can help solve this long-term issue by using four key capabilities to redefine the relationship between humans and technology.

Using the four capabilities in combination can maximize business outcomes, including improved product quality with personalized UX, custom-designed/made products or offerings and enhanced customer engagement throughout the product journey. All of these can accelerate both customers’ and tech providers’ product development time to value realization.

Synthetic data is a class of data that is artificially generated rather than obtained from direct observations of the real world. It is used as a proxy for real data in a wide variety of use cases, including data anonymization, AI and machine learning development, data sharing and data monetization.

Example: GenAI can generate synthetic data to simulate user interactions based on users’ behavioral data. Using synthetic data, products/services can be precisely designed for target uses/customers in order to improve customer experiences.

Personalization is the ability to use synthetic data and the simulation of target use scenarios or user personas to generate highly adaptive UX, content, features or service offerings.

Example: The hardware system can be configured to adapt to customers’ hardware and software use through a Gen-AI-enabled software platform that simulates target use environments and provides optimized performance and UX.

Conversational AI is used through natural language dialogue UIs to greatly enhance the communication between systems and users throughout the entire product journey.

Example: The chatbot can proactively engage with users to guide them in training or in troubleshooting applications.

AI agents are autonomous or semiautonomous software entities that use AI techniques to perceive, make decisions, take actions and achieve goals in their digital or physical environment.

Example: A GenAI-auto agent can assist users in interacting with large language models (LLMs) to automate multiple tasks — for example, to plan a trip, access multiple travel websites, and compare and book the best-priced hotel and airline tickets.