Product and/or Innovation: 3 steps for a fluid Innovation to Product workflow (and the limbos between).
This article was originally published on LinkedIn on May 11, 2020. Migrated to Medium and edited on September 2022.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/product-andor-innovation-3-steps-fluid-workflow-limbos-cesar-miguel/
We see companies focusing on product or production (current needs, short-term ROI…) neglecting innovation, innovation departments completely severed from products that end up adding no value (besides the “innovation theatre”)…
Let’s describe the 3 steps in the innovation to product process and the limbos along the way (the places where ideas and tests end up when they cannot move on). Of course this is not something written in stone and your organisation might implement variations according to its needs…
Innovation and/or product… This is a yin-yang scenario as one can exist without the other, but if we want to guarantee a successful innovation to product workflow, one must coexist next and within the other.
1. THE INTANGIBLE PHASES, IDEAS AND CONCEPTS
Step 1: Ideation phase
This is somehow the most visible step, the low hanging fruit for corporates seeking high visibility for the innovation initiatives. An important role in the team at this stage are facilitators.
Facilitating big ideation workshops, trends conferences, hackathons, brainstormings, think tanks… these usually involve a lot of people and can have very high media visibility. People participating to workshops feel usefulness and engaged after coming up with so many ideas, together. This is extremely important for a cultural transformation, new ways of working, getting teams and stakeholders closer and aligned… but if the innovation process stops there, it usually produces no real value in the long term (since there is no product or service, just ideas, post its and drawings).
Can companies do innovation without product in mind? Yes, they can! It has been and still is a common pitfall for a lot of corporate innovation labs and one of the main reasons why today most companies are disillusioned with the results of the investment they have done in innovation. The generated ideas end up in the Ideas limbo, and the feeling that innovation doesn’t produce anything in the end starts to build up.
Step 2: Concept testing
One step further after the ideation is testing the concept in real life. These are the famous Proof of Concepts, where the goal is to get user feedback in real life. It doesn’t matter if the solution tested is not scalable or does not use the best of technologies, we just need feedback and start thinking about what will be next with scalability in mind. Designers are crucial at this step (another main role in the innovation department).
Note: Some people consider this step as the MVP (minimum viable product), but I don’t necessarily for one simple reason: the tested solution might not be viable! Viability is not a requirement to get first feedback!
- If the product doesn’t work (Oz magician testing, paper mockups…), then it’s a mock-up.
- If the product does work but it is not viable as-is, then it’s a prototype.
- If your tested solution is already scalable and viable, you are skipping step 2 and jumping straight to step 3, and yes, it is an MVP.
This step can be as easy or complicated as we want : the closer we want to be to the real life final solution (using end technology, integrating to legacy systems…), the harder it will get. But you can run a POC with a fake app, Oz magician testing and even mockups, no connection to corporate IT systems… this can be done fairly quickly and allow you to get first feedback and keep iterating and getting closer to the final real solution at each step.
Innovation labs centred around design usually stop at this step. Stopping here will make it extremely difficult to handover any innovation solution to the product teams: final technologies have not been tested, integration is not guaranteed, etc. Concepts end up in the POC limbo.
2. WHEN THINGS BECOME REAL, IDEAS BECOME PRODUCTS
Note: Let me clear about one thing before I start this section: I am in no way advocating for an innovation department being hierarchically under the product direction, neither would I advocate for it being under the marketing direction, not IT. Innovation must be close to all but dependent on none, otherwise big biases will emerge. But that’s a topic for a future more controversial article ;-)
When we do both: innovation and product, only then we can harness the true value and create a healthy and sustainable flow from innovation to product.
Doing the first two stages will generate ideas and mockups or prototypes. But how do we guarantee that the solution is scalable? That we can effectively use it with our legacy systems?
Step 3: Testing a pilot
Testing a Pilot that is sustainable, scalable and capable of being integrated by product teams will shed some light on real life conditions and requirements. All the information at this step will help the product teams smoothly assimilate these innovations into their running product backlog.
Hence the importance of having developers, IT leads and tech experts (and there we have the other profile required!) capable of creating solutions that are easy to assimilate by the product teams working in more constrained environments. Sadly this is difficult to externalise because it requires deep understanding of the corporate technical ecosystem and stack and frequent and quality interactions with legacy product owners.
Very few innovation structures ensure this step with the appropriate internal tech resources and as said at the beginning, even less end-product teams allow enough incoming bandwidth to assimilate innovation solutions, making pilots decelerate and eventually end up in the Pilot limbo…
3. WHEN COMPANIES DO PRODUCT WITHOUT INNOVATION
Having strong product teams with little to no focus on innovation has been the downfall of big traditional companies thinking they have such strong products or business models that no disruption could reach them (you have examples in mind, I am sure… think about photography, mobile phones, taxis, hotels…).
It’s much letting a horse run with blinders : it will do what it has to to move forward, quite fast if necessary and undistracted, but it won’t see the truck coming around the corner and hitting it.
Can a product survive without innovation?
Absolutely ! But probably not in the long run unless it is of first necessity or sell the “traditional”/invariant aspect… sooner or later a new technology will disrupt the way things were done, a new usage will emerge that cannot be addressed or a new business model will supplant the current.
Do we consider evolutions as innovation ? Let’s go back to the previous article about the opportunity vacuum framework : if we are not in any of the 3 adjacents (possible, viable and acceptable), no, it is not innovation, it is just catching up at best.
All products and product owners must include evolutions on the backlog that come from relentless user testing and research, proven working technologies or new economic models. And most of these “proven insights” can come from the innovation department.
Today most product teams are so constrained by budget cuts, or legacy that needs to be caught up, that allowing a percentage of the production capacity to exploration and innovation is just not possible. It even becomes difficult to prioritise the technical debt tasks in the ever growing backlog, how can the product manager think of exploration and innovation?
An Innovation department with strong product/business oriented people (remember that’s one of the main roles to have in the team) can blaze the trail, test first-hand and facilitate the handover. Yet, if the product team has no bandwidth to absorb innovations, the efforts of the innovation team will be in vain.
Do you think Innovation and Product can live without each other? How would you avoid the limbos and ensure a streamlined innovation process? These are not easy questions and it usually comes back to culture, budget and people…
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