Cauvin

The Context Over the years, various product management and development methods have come into vogue, most notably agile and lean startup methods. Agile methods addressed requirements , architecture, and development risks using frequent iterations. Lean startup methods take it a step further, iterating on the entire product strategy, including the unique value proposition , the target market, revenue and cost structure, and marketing and sales channels. Recently, you may have heard more and more chatter about "design thinking". I certainly have. What is it, and how does it differ from agile and lean startup methods? How can companies leverage it to innovate and develop better products? The Definition If you do some web searches, you'll notice a lot of vague references to design thinking and a diversity of views about what it is. After exploring some definitions, I'll borrow from various descriptions and accounts of design thinking to form what I believe is a ...

The Story When Apple unveiled its iPod digital music player back in October 2001, I dismissed it as a  parity product . I already owned the Cowon iAUDIO CW100 MP3 player, loaded with my favorite tunes. There was Apple, generating great hype over the iPod as if it were a breakthrough product. The idea of a portable digital music player was nothing new. The first mass-produced MP3 players came out in 1998. In late 2001, the concept may have been new to a lot of Apple customers, but it wasn't new to me. I proudly showed my MP3 player to friends when they gushed about the iPod. Thus Apple's iPod was not an innovative product in and of itself. Years later, however, I realized the significance of ecosystem of which the iPod was a part. Apple had released iTunes (with technology purchased from  SoundJam MP ) and created the iTunes Store for finding and downloading music. Unlike Napster , it was a safe and legal way of distributing and acquiring music. The prior way of playing...

Join me on 02/28/2011 (Monday) at 5 pm CT for the next ProdMgmt Talk. ProdMgmt Talk is a weekly Twitter event in which product management professionals examine and answer questions about a particular topic. You can follow the conversation here or configure your favorite Twitter tool to show tweets containing the #prodmgmttalk hash tag. This week's topic is innovation and how it relates to product management. We will be discussing the following questions: Are product managers innovators or innovation enablers? What do great product managers do to innovate or foster innovation? What is the relationship between requirements and innovation? Does agile product management foster or hinder innovation? How would you answer these questions? I'll be sharing my thoughts and hope to see yours on Monday.

Does your company suffer from product paralysis? Product paralysis occurs when progress halts on improving or innovating a product. At some point, you've probably experienced: A product team can't agree on major product decisions, so they concentrate on minor bug fixes and enhancements that have little or no market impact. Bold product decisions are made (often by members of the team that just happen to wield the most influence at the time), but the decisions come under fire and are put on hold shortly thereafter. Team members don't buy into product decisions, so they undermine them, stall their execution, or just aren't motivated to be productive in executing them. The most effective product managers - to the extent that company executives empower them to do so - employ three approaches to prevent product paralysis: Base product decisions on market understanding and marketing principles . Teams will not buy in to major product decisions unless they can make a compe...

In their Bloomberg piece, "Why Innovation Is Beginner's Luck" , G. Michael Maddock and Raphael Louis Vitón write that companies emphasizing industry experience in their hiring practices do not, as a general rule, innovate well. On a related note, I've written before that industry experience is a poor substitute for the ability to learn markets . And don't forget Buckingham and Coffman's observation that the best managers hire for talent, not for experience . If you are hiring for innovation, the first bit of advice from Maddock and Vitón is: "Stop hiring leaders from your industry. Ask recruiters to look for a specific problem-solving ability instead of industry experience. Find leaders who have created the results you want in a unique way. For example, if you are faced with disintermediation issues—and all service companies are—look for experts who have tackled disintermediation. It's likely better that they know nothing about sump pumps or ...