How come there often seems to be no direct connection between the things we choose to measure and the goals we are hoping to achieve? Here are a few examples:

• If a company management’s goal is a sustainable long-term growth, why do they measure their decisions based on IRR (Internal Rate of Return)? The metric is useful for measuring a transaction, but it can likely lead to an ultimate distraction of an enterprise vitality if applied to strategic decision making.

• If a Customer Service organization’s goal is Customer Satisfaction, why do we measure performance of the employees based on how quickly they complete a call with a customer? Driving down the cost of customer interaction is a meaningful operational metric, but there is no profitability if customers abandon your operation.

• If an ultimate goal for Product Marketing is demand generation, wouldn’t it be critical to measure why customers buy your product? “The customer rarely buys what the company thinks it is selling him,” as Peter Drucker said.

According to Clayton Christensen, a professor in Harvard Business School and brilliant scholar of Innovation, the root of this problem is the quality of education offered in our business schools. He makes a great point illustrating how wrong choice of key metrics leads to deconstruction of enterprises and entire industries. Clayton is famous for his efforts to re-focus marketing “a job customers hire products to do” as opposed to product’s specs.

As consumers, we all know that our experience with “products” depends on many factors that are not connected to or even correlated with its specifications, functions and features. Quite often customers are more influenced by how easy it is to deal with the supplier or how reliably a product performs, or how simply and consistently it delivers the outcome we require. Yet when we try to measure customer satisfaction, we ask them to score their opinions about characteristics of the product itself. I do appreciate the elegant simplicity of NPS (Net Promoter Score) methodology and its well-documented correlation with profitability, but what specific action can it suggest to a product manager whose product earns a low score?

Steve Blank, Silicon Valley entrepreneurial marketing genius and the author of The Four Steps to the Epiphany book, seconds Christensen’s opinion about the quality of our business schools and is working on the development of an alternative curriculum that is focused on customer development as opposed to financial engineering. Blank is preaching the importance of customer involvement into a product development that appears to be a no-brainer to me, but apparently is a relatively challenging concept to most marketing professionals according to Kristin Zhivago.

The choice of measurements we make has a dramatic influence on the probability of a startup success, according to Eric Ries—a creator of the Lean Startup movement—who has very interesting thoughts on creativity and innovation. Eric thinks that we prefer to use “vanity” metrics that make us feel good instead of helping us to make quality decisions.

So it appears that according to the experts, institutional indoctrination and lack of intellectual honesty are two major reasons for the gap between organizational goals and performance measurements that negatively affect our probability to succeed in business.

I would like to suggest that our compensation system methodology is the third leg of this proverbial stool. Since a majority of the workforce is not compensated for producing results aligned with a long term goals of organizations they work for, we instead end up measuring what is easy to measure and makes us look good.

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.

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.