10 Insights on Innovation Gained from Teaching Product Skills

Since “disruption” has become a mainstream word, companies are looking for ways to create new revenue sources.

The boldest have started to seize existing opportunities through open innovation programmes — initiatives that match intrapreneurial mindsets with entrepreneurial values for the purpose of creating and scaling new growth. Think corporate innovation labs, incubators and accelerators. Because so many tools are available — both offline and online — designing, implementing and managing innovation programmes has never been simpler.

But there are also other companies, equally bold, but quite young in terms of innovative product development. For these companies, I designed a Digital Product Masterclass — a set of workshops to run through the whole funnel of product building. The first class was held in April 2016 and spread over 7 full-day workshops on a wide range of skills, supported by an amazing lineup of speakers.

It was an amazing experience that had an unexpected effect on me: certain patterns emerged, intuitions crystallized into articulated thoughts. Here are some of the insights I have gained following this first iteration of the program.

Everything I will be writing about in this article can be found in the slides prepared for the 7 workshops. Subscribe to the Corporate Innovator’s Newsletter to get the entire online set in the October newsletter.

1. There are no right tools for a faulty mindset. So many people focus on preaching one tool or another. Lean startup, design thinking, agile, you name it. Others focus on finding the perfect tool, the solution to every problem. I’ve been on both sides and I’ve been wrong. Before jumping from one tool or another, keep in mind that the tools can only help you with the “HOW” — but first you need to figure out the “WHY” and the “WHAT”- depending on what you aim to achieve.

Takeaway: figure out what you want first, and then select the most suitable tool for the job. Change tools as soon as you find a better one for the job, but don’t change the job too often or easily. Never stop searching better tools.

2. If you pay attention to the process, you’ll be able to replicate it. What matters most? The road or the destination? Improving team motivation, business profitability or product performance, they are all end-results that rely on incremental steps, so they should be process-driven. When you look for outcomes only, then you might miss the bigger picture, the whole dynamic that brought you to where you are, and you won’t be able to replicate it or discern what went good or wrong.

Takeaway: look for measurable progress, that’s what your team and customers are looking for anyway. Ignore this advice and you will soon find out that while you were focusing on improving certain outcomes, things got worse.

3. Have a plan, be ready to change it. What is the right amount of focus on strategy? Too much might lead to analysis paralysis, too little and you might end up living the “if you don’t know where you’re going, any path will do” syndrome. The whole point of strategy is to take you from point A to point B. However, strategy is merely a way of going places. Your values, behaviours, and culture — which lead to strategy being implemented one way or another — will get you there. The V2MOM process and a business model canvas (lean canvas, for early products) will do the job. Then focus on execution: experiment, measure, repeat. Use OKRs, run lean, do everything in stages.

Takeaway: Find the least amount of strategy necessary to go to the next small stage of a big outcome. Don’t be afraid to oversimplify.

4. The best hack is working your butt off. Surviving means acting in a deliberate and conscious manner, being willing to do the work. Hacks can work only after you’ve done the work and completed the milestones that make a product stand out. No hack can replace listening to your customers, finding out what could be improved.

Takeaway: Stop reading about the “how-tos.” What worked for those guys will not work for you. Not even they could replicate their own results 6 months down the line, if they’re doing the same things all over again.

5. Copying is second nature, but also is failure. The human mind is irrational and cannot cope with statistics. Two good readings on this are Fooled by Randomness or Ariely’s Predictably Irrational. The fundamental attribution error — focusing on the internal traits of a person rather than on external influencers which explain that person’s behaviour — will mess up everything. The real, meaningful reasons why some things worked for some people and don’t work for others are kept hidden (intentionally or not).

Takeaway: digging for the answers that others already found out is what blocks you from progress. Instead, focus on new ways of finding answers. It is good to know the answers that other people learned but it is better to have a way to find YOUR answers.

6. Before iterating again, find out what went wrong. Products and businesses don’t die because there’s no market need, they run out of cash or because they encountered team issues. Truth is, more often than not, it is shortsightedness, sloppiness and arrogance that kills projects. It all comes down to our understanding of cause and effect. The thing is, they don’t really work like we know in theory. I realised that I cannot move a mountain, but I can work on creating the right context where mountains can move.

Takeaway: Embrace humbleness, admit that nothing is in your control and be prepared to re-start from scratch as often as possible, because it will happen.

7. Learn to cope with experiments. Ego keeps you entrenched in the same processes and makes any new technique hard to implement. Once we suspend our egos, we can start asking better questions and really listen to the rest of the world — after all, we are nothing without our customers but a company with good theoretical values. We’re ready to build something great, something that matters when we start listening more than presuming and understand that Rome was a product of a very long overnight success.

Takeaway: Build experiments, measure results, adjust your worldview (and product) to what others’ behaviours tell you. To put it on a scale: ego suspension > active listening > empathy.

8. Listen 100 times and iterate once. The winner (not necessarily the one achieving the result, but the one gaining the most from the experience) is always the guy with a better theory of mind. The one who has a deeper understanding of the “how & why” of the people they work with. Moving towards an empathetic attitude is just the start. The end goal should be achieving behaviour modification of the people around, that comes from conviction rather than an imposed mindset.

The takeaway: start asking better questions in order to be effective. Listen to understand, not to respond, and then go on — most people stop once they understand the reasoning behind an action. This is your chance to dig deeper, and understand the emotional background behind behaviours.

9. Winning does not mean taking it all, sometimes it’s just about holding on: Every single human interaction is a collision between two frames. The strongest frame always wins and the winning frame gets the job, the customer, or your team culture right. Being in a winning frame does not mean you have to be inflexible in your approach. Rather than that, you have to take in enough impact — from your competitors or your customers — but still maintain the form and substance of your message.

The takeaway: Train your brain to work better by understanding the most fundamental mental models — the ones that will do the most work in your favour. Getting ahead is almost never about a final win.

10. The problem with stack fallacy: People struggle with the mistaken belief that it is trivial to build the layer above the one in which your company operates. This is prevalent in the tech world, where outsourcing companies think products are easy, or companies that want to innovate think changing their area of expertise is a piece-of-cake. This gives them false confidence that they can easily build, compete and win in this new market. The stack fallacy is a result of human nature — we overvalue what we know and undervalue what we know we don’t know.

The takeaway: products are much more than software. Think revenue models, supply channels, distribution, de-risking the whole development process, etc. Knowing “what” you are building is much more important than knowing the “how”.

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