A few months ago, I wrote in this blog about Musing on difference between successful product and Innovation. This article was re-published in a few online venues and generated a few critical comments about lack of clarity in definition of terms, specifically about what makes a product “innovative.” Many people would agree that most products that the market considers innovative often do not include any technological breakthroughs.
I keep struggling with the definition of what is an innovative blockbuster product (or service), and this is yet another attempt: A truly innovative product is the one that delights its customers by anticipating their needs before they knew they have them. In other words, if you want to develop a blockbuster product, you should stop trying to better serve the existing needs of your customers and instead try to discover needs that customers may not realize they have and address them.
That definition was not quite satisfactory either, so I kept thinking about it, and I think this is a better version: An innovative product is the one that significantly simplifies customer experience of performing the “job” they “hired” this product to do.
I think simplification of customer experience in achieving the desired outcome is an ultimate goal of any product creator. In my opinion, the experience starts with the recognition that the product is a potential “candidate” for the “job” on hand, and continues from a process of acquisition of the product through different steps until the desired result is achieved. If a product can reduce the number of steps in that sequence by 30% or more without sacrificing the quality of the experience or by improving it, it is truly an innovative product.
So how one goes about creating one?
1. Stop seeing a product as a collection of functions and features. Specifications are not what makes a product innovative. Get a clear understanding of what is a “job” this product will apply to do.
2. Stop thinking of “competition” as products similar to yours, or products in the same price range and sitting on a store shelf next to yours. Think of “competition” as any alternative candidate for the product’s “job” regardless of technology, price or package. Would you think of a digital camera as a competitor of a mobile phone?
3. Gain deep empathy of customers’ experience on their journey to a desired outcome. Learn what is important to them, not to your engineers or marketing people. No disrespect intended towards your partners, but they will be first to thank you when your focus on customer experience will result in a truly innovative product.
We have developed a webinar “Why Companies Do a Poor Job Planning New Products” that provides more details about the ideas and process involved. Please click here to view the schedule.
Every great product starts with a great idea. Unfortunately, many mediocre products and outright flops have also started with an idea that seemed great at the time. I would like to evoke a memory of the patron-saint of Product Managers and quote:
“Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do. That is true for the companies, and it’s true for products.” – Steve Jobs
Unfortunately, we fall in love with our great ideas all too often and tend to overvalue creativity at the expense of critical thinking. Let’s face it – we are paid to create great products, not to engage in “paralysis through analysis.” The cost and effort required to conduct market research is most frequently invested into finding evidence to support our great idea, not to challenge it; hence the survey questions and focus group discussions often default to a pro bias.
I do not believe that human beings are capable of processing information without a bias; however, customer bias is much more valuable than a company/product bias to support critical GO/NO GO decisions. Insights found in experience of consumers, who are most likely to become customers for your proposed product, are in my opinion the best information to help us make that decision.
Insight is a tricky concept that is often used without clear definition of its meaning. I would like to suggest a few ideas on how to define it:
Insight is…
• Penetrating understanding of consumers
• An undiscovered truth that suggests an unmet need
• Something that makes you go, “AHA!”
These came from member contributions to a Customer Intelligence LinkedIn Group discussion and do not pretend to be an exhaustive list. The classic example I have come across is:
“People don’t want quarter-inch drills. They want quarter-inch holes.” – Theodore Levitt, Harvard Business School
Here is a “best practice” used by some of our clients to make this decision:
Identify and articulate a “job” the proposed product (or service) is going to be purchased by its customers to do. If you are not familiar with this product/job correlation concept, you want to learn about research of Clayton Christensen.
Identify the most successful products currently available on the market that people buy to do that “job.” These products may or may not have anything to do with the technology, features and specifications of your proposed product.
Find and aggregate customer-generated content describing their experience with products identified in the previous step.
Analyze this content to identify shortcomings or inadequacies of currently available products to fulfill customer needs from their experience and perspective. Our clients use Market Intelligence Analysis reporting service to save time and effort, but it can be done manually as well.
“Deep Dive” into those elements of customer experience that score below customer expectations as a group to generate an insight.
Ask yourself if your proposed product can improve customer experience based on the insights you have discovered in previous steps. If the answer is ‘No, but…’ follow the advice of Ron White who said, “If you have got an idea… let it go.” The best hope for this product is to become one of many options available to consumers “to-do-the-job” and no fancy marketing communications would be able to differentiate it in their mind.
The cost of error can be relatively low in an agile software development business, but it quickly escalates into millions if product has to be manufactured in volume and brought into consumer market to be tested. On that scale, even a small reduction of product failure ratio will generate outstanding return on investment in this methodology and effort.
I keep struggling with the definition of what is an innovative blockbuster product (or service), and this is yet another attempt: A truly innovative product is the one that delights its customers by anticipating their needs before they knew they have them. In other words, if you want to develop a blockbuster product, you should stop trying to better serve the existing needs of your customers and instead try to discover needs that customers may not realize they have and address them.
Traditionally, companies use customer feedback to assess satisfaction with existing products and to validate product developer’s ideas for the improvements. One of the most popular methods used for collecting customer feedback are survey and panels, where the questions asked or topics moderated tend to reflect interests of product development team and focus on how customers experience their product.
I would like to pose that truly innovative product developers use a different perspective to discover the needs customers cannot articulate in controlled or moderated environment – the perspective of holistic experience of a job the customer “hired” the product in question to do.
The journey starts with the understanding of what the “job” they want to do is and what a desirable outcome is. The next step is to imagine how this whole experience can be simplified in its entirety, which may or may not involve your product. I use the word “simplified” because it is an ultimate description of improvement in a context of “desirable outcome.” Terms we usually use to describe improvements – Better, Faster, Cheaper – are traps anchoring us to the incremental changes of status quo.
The complete customer experience starts with a notion that the desired outcome can be achieved, and goes through discovery of components required, acquisition of the components and/or materials and skills all the way through a process of applying them. Your product may be just one of many in that process, but if you can make it easier to find at the conception stage, simpler to understand that it is the best alternative to get the job done at the acquisition stage, and require less skill and/or effort to operate, that will make your product a lot more successful. However, truly innovative products do often have an element of disruption that does not easily fit into organizational structures. If you are a drill product manager, and survey satisfaction of a drill purchasers, the ideas of alternative wall anchoring to hung pictures will not likely come up. However, even if it does, how does it help you or your department? I wonder if a celebrated genius of Steve Jobs could only manifest itself because he operated from above of organizational hierarchy.
The question is, “Can Customer Feedback help to create innovative products?” If you define Customer Feedback as the results of survey or other structured information-gathering method, the answer is NO. The best outcome of these exercises is reduced uncertainty about your assumptions (i.e., confirmation of what you already know). The probability of discovering an idea that could lead to the conceptualization of an innovative product is extremely low, but could be improved somewhat by allowing open-ended questions and a lot of unstructured comments.
I define Customer Feedback as any and all customer-generated content available about a product/service in any form customers chose to communicate it. That includes company and public forums, customer support notes and call transcripts, company sales notes, customer’s Facebook comments, and customer videos and reviews published online. The wider Customer Feedback “fishing” net is cast, the higher probability of innovative ideas discovery. Combine it with the right analysis methodology that does not tie you up with pre-conceived keywords and ontology, and your chances are looking even better.
“You cannot manage what you cannot measure.” Those are well known and accepted words of wisdom that have been taught to thousands of MBA students for decades. There is a lesser popular truth though—that measuring wrong things can really hurt your business. Definition, selection and design of appropriate, balanced and concise metrics, as well as the processes for continuous delivery of these metrics, are the key management challenges for every organization.
1. Focusing on the “wrong” metrics will create unintended results.
One of the more graphic examples of “wrong” metrics is a ratio of successful convictions, widely used to measure success or reputation of public prosecutors. This one causes US taxpayers to waste hundreds of millions of dollars in court costs, compensation for wrongful imprisonment and lost productivity every year. Essentially this metric is measuring a percentage of tried cases that result in conviction against the total number of cases tried by the prosecutor. The higher the percentage of convictions, the more “successful” the prosecutor is considered to be regardless of how well justice is served, how many lives are destroyed and how much financial damage is inflicted.
Another example is the evaluation of a Product Manager performance based on the attainment of product forecast goals. While I am familiar with a popular definition of a Product Manager’s role as a “Product CEO,” the organizational reality does not often support this definition, as product managers rarely have administrative authority to enforce their decisions and act mostly as influencers. It is intellectually dishonest to keep them accountable for a result of a sum of aggregated decisions made by a multitude of people, but most importantly it does not help to bring desired improvements in products performance.
2. Focusing on unbalanced metrics will promote bad behavior.
Performance is often measured by a singular metric, yet people are rarely expected to behave one-dimensionally. Everyone knows that a lot of digressions will be forgiven to a salesman who consistently makes his quota, even though his lack of desire and/or skill to forecast costs your company serious hits to profit margin. Imagine it is the end of a quarter and you are deeply discounting your product in a desperate attempt to make your company revenue numbers, just to see your “best” performer bringing in a “bluebird” deal you had no visibility of. He just caused you to give away profits, and you did not need to sacrifice for “please sign today” deals. A secondary measurement attached to accuracy of forecast and associated with commission structure can dramatically improve a company’s profitability.
3. Concise metrics promote action.
Conversely, the convoluted metrics are a waste of time, expense and opportunity. Many Customer Satisfaction measurements are falling into this category because they are often too general, and the best cause of action you may take is to do more studies. Most companies do not even consider competitive influences on their customer’s assessment of their satisfaction with their products or services. Unless feedback from customer analysis of every key component of customer experience is continuously conducted, and in relation to competitive options available to the customers, it is very difficult to figure out why overall Customer Satisfaction is moving higher or lower, who should take any action and what kind of action should be taken.
In conclusion, I would like to suggest that any performance metric has to be evaluated in a holistic model as it is very easy to come up with a clever way to improve one aspect of a specific performance at a detriment of the long-term well-being of the company as a whole.
The discussions on importance of innovation are all over Social Media. The calls for innovating ourselves out from the current economic malaise are coming from the President of Consumer Electronics Association to the President of the United States. In the words of Louis XIV (or was it Mel Brooks?) – “It’s good to be the King!” – for the rest of us it would be helpful to put some definitions around these terms. I do not pretend to be an expert on the subject of innovation, but I like to be specific and want to offer some ideas for discussion.
So what differentiate commercially successful product or service from the innovation?
I would like to propose that successful products gain market traction, meet their sales forecasts and generate anticipated profit margins. Innovative products re-shape the market place, create new categories, and generate blockbusting profits. Innovative products successfully defeat the competitors’ assaults for long periods of time.
Development and introduction of successful products or services is a very challenging and risky endeavor, as we are well aware.
The Recent Portfolio Management Benchmark Survey sponsored by Planview, reported that only 52.3% of products meet with commercial success, while 21.2% were “killed prior to launch”. They did not specify the type of products or industries covered by this survey, but my personal experience pegs the success ratio well under 40% mark.
The risk level for innovation is even higher. It is estimated that only 1 out 3,000 new innovative ideas becomes a commercial success. We also know that most innovative products rarely have anything to do with technological inventions, but have everything to do with the scale of market adoption. Peter Dreker, the father of modern Management Science, wrote in his book “Innovation and Entrepreneurship”, that a 15 year “gestation” period is the average time observed between the time of an original invention and the time of its commercial realization.
We all know examples of such innovations as Ford T, Microsoft Word, iPod and iPad to name a few that dominated and still dominate their product categories. These are very different products, however the thought process, methods and techniques of the people who are behind the creation of these products, are a mystery we want to discover.
I would like to propose that the key difference between really good Product Managers and the Innovators is in a way they perceive and understand the markets they target.
While a Product Manager segments the markets in terms of demographics or personae for which they develop a product, an Innovator is focused on the Customer Experience of people, who struggle to use existing products to do their chores, and interprets these struggles into the definition of innovative vision for new generation products.
In other words they concentrate on improvement of EXPERIENCE as oppose to improvement of a PRODUCT.
There is a heated debate in a Product Management community about the Role of Market Research in creation of innovative products and I have mused on this subject earlier on this blog.
Product managers, who subscribe to a “thought leadership” (as oppose to “customer participation”) model, love to quote Henry Ford who supposedly said – “If I asked my customers what they want, they simply would have said a faster horse.” The “customer driven innovation” camp proponents are swearing by Customer Feedback and Voice of Customer based methodologies. However there is no clear evidence that either site consistently out-innovate their opponents.
During this webinar we will explore and analyze traditional methods of product definition process, their limitations and their applications that often lead to incremental improvements as oppose to true innovation. We will talk about
What separate a successful product from INNOVATIVE product
What are differences between a Product Manager and a Star Product Manager , and
How the knowledge of the market helps to close the gaps between the two.
Since I don’t know a source of really authoritative, undisputable and complete definition of the term “innovation” I would like to propose that most innovations usually are new applications of previously invented technologies and/or processes. Truly innovative products usually find new ways to use existing inventions to improve experience of people. The confusion arises when practitioners focus on improvingproducts rather than experience with the product, because that is where a difference between “innovation” and incremental “improvement” lives.
Product managers, who subscribe to a “thought leadership” (as oppose to “customer participation”) model, love to quote Henry Ford who supposedly said – “If I asked my customers what they want, they simply would have said a faster horse.” There is no debate that a motorized carriage was an amazing invention, which by the way was not created by Ford – he innovated scalable assembly line manufacturing, among other processes. However his quote only implies that survey and/or forum market research methodologies are not suitable for validation of truly innovative products in conceptual stage of development. He couldn’t help but notice all the horse manure on the streets and inefficiencies of small cargo shipping associated with horse carriages. The art of “noticing” how customers experience products, currently available to them, is called ethnographic research and there is no innovation possible without some degree of it.
During the last SVPCamp 2011, I was really tickled to see a presentation by Tony Ulwyck of Strategyn, called “Silence the Voice of the Customer (VOC) and Create Breakthrough Products”. My first reaction to the subject line of the presentation was extremely negative as I, like possibly many others, did not pay close enough attention to terminology he used. In fact VoC is defined by most practitioners as company stimulated customer feedback about your existing products, which is one of the best sources of inspiration for incremental product improvements. Considering this, Tony’s subject line is very valid and surely catches people’s attention. Since VoC collection mechanisms are designed around company’s desire to collect and process the content in the most efficient way, they often do not encourage free and easy sharing of customer experiences, and the ways and reasons customers use the products. That is the primary reason why VoC does not offer much opportunity for discovery of “Aha” insights that lead to innovation. However the quest of an enterprise for efficiency often leads to missed opportunities to innovate as freely flowing stories about how the customers use the products and what jobs they “hired” these products to do, contain insights that can be discovered only by much more expensive ethnographic research. Online Word of Mouth (WoM) opinion mining technologies hold a promise of help this discovery to become timely, scalable and economical process.
It is very hard to sell to people we don’t understand. We turn to market research for help to understand who our best potential customers are. This quest usually starts with assumptions about common characteristics these people have to be predisposed to our products or services. It is common to assume that certain age and gender groups, or their residence, would make them more interested and capable to spend their money on our offering. Normally we come to these assumptions based on our personal experiences and intuition that we call “common sense”.
I wonder if that “common sense” is the same one that came with very accurate definition of what happen to us when we ASSUME?
I am sure that most people would prefer to KNOW instead of assuming and estimating, but there is no good way to know what does not exist yet. However there is a way of making better assumptions and estimates.
Steve Jobs is often and rightly credited as the genius behind Apple’s great success in assuming what consumers really want, but I wonder if there is a method behind his magic. Just how much sorcery is needed to figure out the requirements for iPod if you take a really close look on what customers, who purchased MP3 players, have experienced? Imagine watching these people figuring out tiny menus trying to find and play a music track they want to hear. Surely the age and gender may influence just how much of inconvenience one can tolerate, but the very fact that these people have made a decision to spend their money for something that is so imperfect, uniquely qualify them as a special market segment that supersede the traditional market segmentation criteria based on demographics.
The special applications tablets and digital e-readers were around for a few years and relatively large number of people and companies spent considerable time and money using these devices. Wouldn’t it make sense to learn from them what could make their investment even more compelling, and as the result attractive to even larger audience?
Consistency of the Apple success in introducing the products customers want suggests scalable methodology and transferable skill. I think the vision of current, successful products of your potential competitors as an early prototype of your future blockbuster is at the foundation of this methodology. The skill of creative analysis of customer experience with these products provides a detail road map to the future success.
Please RSVP by Monday, January 24. Registration is limited.
Questions? E-mail the Webcast Team or call 703-907-7797.
Description:
Participants will learn the methods, techniques and best practices for use of online Word of Mouth (WOM) to stimulate demand for CE products; methodology and tools for market research of social media to measure product reputation and customer satisfaction without breaking the bank.
Who should attend:
Marketing Product Managers, Market Research and Market Intelligence professionals, PR and Marketing Communications professionals interested in product and brand equity management.
Presenter Bio:
Gregory Yankelovich has been involved with customer centric product management and marketing, CRM process best practices and their automation for the last 15 years. He currently serves as CEO of Amplified Analytics, the firm that specializes in use of opinion mining and natural language processing technologies for analysis of CE Customer reviews, word of mouth and other forms of customer feedback.
Please share this invitation with your colleagues and friends.
A few months ago, I wrote in this blog about Musing on difference between successful product and Innovation. This article was re-published in a few online venues and generated a few critical comments about lack of clarity in definition of terms, specifically about what makes a product “innovative.” Many people would agree that most products that the market considers innovative often do not include any technological breakthroughs.
