Let's talk about how to fill up this pipeline and drive
ideas through it in a disciplined but effective way.
When we start here in the pipeline with idea generation
and Steve Blank who came up with those four steps we looked at earlier he has this thing,
you've got to get outside the building to come up with good ideas.
And I love that sentiment.
The question is, where do you go?
Are those good ideas under a stone?
Are they sealed within an ancient glacier in the Arctic?
Or maybe they're in their grandma's attic or kangaroo's pouch?
It turns out, there are some pretty reliable places
where you can get these ideas and it's
true that they don't come from inside a conference room
most of the time. Let's talk about a few of those.
My favorite subject interviews.
This is where we go out and we talk to customers,
users in our area of interest and we ask them non-leading questions.
Like our questions to the backyard chicken coop keeper would be things like.
What's it like keeping chickens in your backyard?
What do you most like about it?
What do you least like about it?
What is the hardest thing?
If you could change one thing what might it be?
And you can see you want to kind of go from general to
specific because you don't want to lead the subject.
There are some resources on how to do this in the customer discovery handbook,
a resource on the Coursera.
Reverse hackathons, another great tool.
If you don't know what a hackathon is,
it's a place where people come with ideas and they work to hack them together,
usually over a weekend or something or even an evening.
And a reverse hackathon is where instead you have
people that are your customers or users of interest,
they come and they talk about their problems to you.
So for example, the cooped up people,
might try to organize a reverse hackathon with a local backyard chicken coop meetup.
So they would say, "Hey,
tell us about what is like keeping these chickens
and what things would ideally be easier?
What's the hardest thing about it?
What made you want to do it in the first place?
What make make you want to stop doing it?"
And they just talk about what it's like to do those things.
That's a great way to get ideas.
Customer comments.
These could be on your site,
on a third party site that's relevant.
It's a great place. There's people talk online now and they talk to each other a lot.
So it's a great place to go for
authentic stuff that somebody might not say to you in person.
You're consulting and support organization.
This is a great place to get information about what's going on with customers.
They hear all sorts of things that may not
be within your core business but may be extremely relevant.
Open Innovation is a kind of blanket term for
transparent work between corporations and institutions like universities, for example.
And things that a company can do for example
here is establish what Steve Blank an evangelist,
similarly call innovation outpost,
so in an area of interest.
So for example, Salinas California which is near where I live is
a Innovation Center for AG tech or agricultural technology.
So cooped up, if they're not in Salinas,
maybe they just want to put somebody there to keep an eye on what's going on and
talk to partners there and just generally figure out what's up.
There are also companies that will run pilots for you with
startups like pilot 44 and Clate in San Francisco.
They will get a brief from you about a problem you want to see solved and they'll go
get a bunch of startups to prototype and render ideas for you.
So those are examples of open innovation.
Collaborating with the university is also kind of a longstanding classic example.
And then finally, you really want to look at disruption catalysts.
So for example, the advent of online video
was the disruption catalyst that disrupted Blockbuster Video.
What are the disruption catalysts operating in your space?
Keep an eye on those and keep an eye on items that are adjacent to those.
When we move from idea generation, a concept testing,
this is the 90 to 120 day period usually often,
where a dedicated team goes out and their charter is to test an idea.
This is a great way to avoid getting
the wrong resources with the wrong idea at the wrong time.
Where for instance, you have a bunch of developers or
sales people on your team that think they're supposed to make software,
go sell something and you know that this isn't the right time to go do that.
You end up wasting your time.
So that is a good amount of time,
just enough time to do something.
Not too much time to fiddle around or worry about building a whole company.
One of the things that's kind of interesting here is getting the right kind of talent.
And so there's a lot of interest in how corporations move their talent
across these horizons through H3, H2 to H1.
Sometimes they call them red and blue teams that seems too politically charged.
So I would just call them the plaid team and the pinstripe team.
So the plaid team are generally speaking people who like to do these innovation projects,
the pinstripe team likes to optimize the H ones.
Now you need some interchange of plaid people moving from H threes to H twos to H ones.
But some of them really would prefer to stay up there and continue to test new stuff.
Others would prefer to take on in optimizing an existing business.
Think about what kind of product manager you are,
what do you most want to work on and make sure you're
thinking about that if you're involved in an innovation program.
Where are you now? Where do you want to go?
You want to stay with your project or you want to try something new?
Most importantly here is to winnow constantly and get
rid of the ideas that aren't rated to go through disciplined experimentation.
Now we move from something that has gone from an H3 to an H2,
we have a fledgling business.
What's important here, is just straddling the things that you need to scale up
and figure out how to do better with the things that
you know are already working and you need to optimize.
That's an interesting kind of hybrid challenge for a product manager.
And finally, a few of these will make their all the way to H1 and they'll
become a big business that has scaled
and throws off cash so you can
go throw money at the beginning of the pipeline again and create
a nice durable corporation that's producing lots of
money and creating good opportunities for product managers.
So those are some ideas about how you keep this pipeline full.
If you feel like you don't have
an amazing idea that you are ready to pitch to management,
take note that I think as Eric Ries says,
"Successful innovators have better processes not better ideas",
and I think this is a better process for the
corporation and the product manager to reliably innovate.
Alex CowanFaculty & Batten Fellow
