Product innovation looks like a “mission impossible”

The full backlog, urgent operational topics, skills or knowledge are only a few of the many challenges. And all of these are valid and common for most of the teams, especially in IT.

Even so, some products make this “mission impossible” possible.

So, what’s the difference between the few “champions” and the rest?

Looking closely, you can observe that the main difference lies in how these products relate to novelty and disruption.

While most products see innovation rather conservative, as a task, as a separate topic in the backlog, requiring additional resources, recognizable innovative products see innovation as a characteristic of the strategy allowing them to make an exponential leap in the user experience.

The product innovation is not just one time instance. It has to have a constant flow to have results, as many innovative ideas will not have the expected result.

That’s the reason why the product innovation process starts much earlier than the innovative idea itself.

In few words the steps of product innovation look like this:

• It starts for an outcome-driven reason.
• It requires an active search for sources of innovation to identify the best idea(s) to fulfill that value.
• The ideas are tried out, results-observed, and the process constantly adapted.
• The product/market fit is ready.
• To move ahead, the necessary sponsorship has to be found.
• Only then can we continue with the product scaling up in a value-driven way.

In this context, who should drive the product innovation?

This question misleads the answer. One word — “Who” — and the confusion appears. It looks like innovation depends solely on a person.

In my view, it should be about “What” drives product innovation.

The answer is a tight mixture of the right product vision, the product strategy, and the backlog.

As I mentioned already the recognizable innovative products see innovation as a characteristic of the strategy allowing them to make an exponential leap in the user experience.

And how to generate this exponential leap with product innovation?

There are few aspects to be considered.

1. Innovation starts for an outcome-driven reason.

2. Innovation is part of the “DNA signature”

3. External ecosystem has to be carefully and actively managed

Outcome-driven reason and “DNA signature”:

Here is an example to make it easy:

Instead of “I would like to introduce visual recognition in my product,” which positions innovation on top of other tasks and make it something less critical, consider 3D scanning and visual recognition as one of the answers to a straightforward objective: “I would like to simplify the master data acquisition process.”

The perspective on the backlog itself changes in this case:

· Each topic should be quite clear about expected benefits in regards with today and tomorrow for the customers.

· Each topic is an opportunity to introduce an exponential leap in customer experience.

This means that instead of finding “regular” solutions, which I use every day, I make a choice to disrupt the product on purpose for unmatched customer experience.

The other layer I consider essential is the “evaluation context” of the required features.

Most of the time, “today characteristics” steal our view, cost, time, and knowledge. While the impact on tomorrow on customers, team, value, and market have the same or even higher importance.

“Saving today” makes heroes out of the team, but “preparing your product for tomorrow” keeps your product in business longer. So, the future must always be a daily preoccupation with product management.

A product owner asked me once, “how to do it? I don’t even have the time to think …”

If this is the case, I recommend stopping the development line as long as needed, keeping only the operations running until you put together the product again in terms of: vision and strategy, and review the backlog from a value-driven perspective. It seems hard but this is what we do when we lose the direction. We reposition and refocus.

How do I find the knowledge I need?

The market is full of knowledge in all forms: documents, movies, tutorials, and specialists.

Once the product team and manager open up to different viewpoints, the team would immediately learn how to answer this question. So, this is a topic like “Let’s tackle this problem when we face it.”

How to search for sources of innovation?

One of the best book I found on this topic was “Innovation & Entrepreneurship” by Peter Drucker.

He identifies seven sources. Even though the book was written several years ago, I still find them very relevant to our reality today.

From all the seven sources, I would emphasize two in this article:

• Innovation source — Incongruities –

Incongruity means the difference between where you are and where the market shows that you can be with regards to a specific topic. Imagine during DevOps you are at a certain point with the implementation and it seems like the best position you can ever get, while some teams/ companies are much far away.

This incongruity mainly reveals needs. But as every problem has a minimum of two approaches, conservative and disruptive, it can also show a lot of other opportunities. If you focus on closing that gap, you might become a trendsetter in the area.

• Innovation source — Perception –

In this case, even the underlining facts don’t change; the perception of that topic changes. To observe these sources, you require a fresh judgment. These perception changes are a real challenge for every generation.

I can give you two examples:

Change management –

The underlying facts that a change essentially means disturbance and that humans are rather conservative than change-addicted apply here too. Even the change needs to be managed; the new perception puts less emphasis on these aspects, especially in self-organized environments. So, change management in self-organized teams is still a valid and vital point, but it has to be approach differently, considering the new understanding.

Loyalty –

Loyalty seems to have been diminished in the last few years. The primary underlying fact for “loyalty” is still the same: a strong feeling of belongingness. Looking closer, it can be observed that the “object” of loyalty changes. Adherence to a company shifts to adherence to a community. Adherence to a leader becomes more like loyalty towards an influencer. Adherence to a brand turns into a commitment to whatever is emotionally engaging.

Even if we like it or not, many perceptions changed only in the recent years. There are people/companies following these changes actively and even forcing them in a specific way.

As ignorance of the perception changes, it might put the product in trouble. On the other hand exploiting the perception changes could make the product a differentiator among its kind.

External ecosystem has to be carefully and actively managed

External ecosystem means everything around that innovation itself like competitors, market, customers, supporters, detractors, relationships, funds and there are many.

Just to keep things simple I would say few things about external ecosystems:

- An innovation is born by a person or a team and most of the time is killed by the external ecosystem(s).

- On the other hand the external ecosystem makes an innovation great.

- To manage the external ecosystem requires other category of “driving license” than software engineer one.

To face the ecosystem there are few approaches which can be combined:

1 — Adapting — pivot your idea/ solution to adapt to the ecosystem.

2 — Smart usage — Make use of the ecosystem characteristics opportunities, potential, even weaknesses.

3 — Challenge — reshape the ecosystem by challenging its limits.

4 — Shift — Make a conscious shift to a different ecosystem.

5 — Create — Create a new ecosystem.

The innovation ecosystem must be managed from the day 1 of an innovation. Hard to do this. I know. On the other hand so necessary.

Conclusion:

I see the discussion about who should lead product innovation, in a product team, as irrelevant.

I would find more relevant to get a room.

Yes, a room!

An excellent place that will allow the team, for few hours, to openly and actively discuss how to make “a quantum leap” (as M. Gladwell says) by disrupting and innovating, right from the ways of working to operational as well as feature development.

If the result of this discussion is the idea of a new product, it is also fine.