What's Missing From Your Product Innovation Process, Why, and How to Fix It

By Phil Green (@inmagic) Jun 23, 2011

Consider product innovation for a moment. How do you go about deciding what features and functionality to build into your next release? How do you ensure you’re developing and building technology in accordance with your customers’ needs? Do you even have an innovation process?

I recently lobbed these and similar questions to several of my fellow CTO Forum members during a recent meeting. Most were still following what I consider to be a traditional process: Hire product managers, have them talk to customers and gather feedback. Then add some analysis of the competition and a dash of salt, and out pops what engineers refer to as a "groomed backlog," a list of prioritized features that should be built into future products.

Sound like your company’s approach? It seems like a sensible strategy, but why does it fall short and often fail? Here are three primary culprits, and how new ideation system technology can address them.

Three Reasons Why Product Innovation May Fall Short

1. Product Manager Olympics

This is where product manager bullies bench-press their latest ideas and kick sand in the face of lesser product managers. These “bullies” have greater say in what ideas are acted upon — usually their own. Many times they want to implement their new idea for the idea’s sake. They “know” it will be a hit with customers, but they don’t have any real evidence to back it up. Without evidence from the community, these product managers often see their ideas fail. If you build it, customers won’t necessarily come. This approach is also very demotivating for engineers, with rippling effects throughout the organization and customers. Ingenuity and creative spirit are often lost when engineers are building speculative technology.

2. We are only human

Let’s be frank. We overlook and forget things sometimes. We might cut corners in the essence of time. For instance, product managers might not talk to enough customers, which limits visibility and insight into customer needs and wants. Or they might talk to the wrong customers, such as those who don’t have much experience with the company’s products. They can severely skew product managers’ perspectives. Companies need ways to ensure that everyone in the user community can speak up, have a voice and vote on what they want to see in upcoming product releases.

3. Follow the leader

Product managers often request features that mimic their company’s competition. This can be great for the current release because it can provide a near-term competitive edge. But it can lead to big problems in the future if the product management and engineering teams don’t fully understand where the feature is going and what value it’s supposed to provide users. They risk designing it incorrectly because they lack user-based context. As a result, the feature might not scale in future releases. Future improvements can also be more difficult to build due to lack of insight into and validation of users’ needs when the feature was originally designed.

The Benefits of Using Ideation or Idea Management Systems

What’s missing from this approach is a system that extracts the voice of the customer in a structured, ongoing manner to let companies develop product roadmaps that continuously deliver a competitive advantage and help generate revenue. Increasingly, these are ideation or idea management systems.

These systems bring the voice of the customer community into the development process. They let customers submit their ideas for new products or product enhancements, review other customers’ ideas and vote on them.