Innovative Product Managers

In his article, Innovating in Large Companies, Marty Cagan highlights the fact that many successful companies allow their engineers to spend 20% of the time on innovative projects of their choice. Marty encourages companies to allow Product Managers as well as engineers to spend 20% of their time innovating. Why is this a good idea?
– Because many successful products come from the bottom up rather than the top down.

Tim Brown, in his Harvard Business Review article, stresses that innovation comes through observations, observing how people use current products - what products could help them do their jobs better.

Marty in the same article reminds us “that innovation is rarely about solving an entirely new problem. More often it is solving an existing problem in a new way. So watching people struggle with their existing solutions is a great way to highlight innovation opportunities.”

Good product managers, according to Jeff Lash, do not just gather requirements — they understand unmet needs, existing problems, and opportunities for improvement, and they then use that information to determine the requirements for the product.

So what are the characteristics of innovative Product Management? Tim Brown identifies five attributes that can be applied to a Product Manager:

1. The Product Manage has EMPATHY: that’s to say they have the ability to image the world from multiple perspectives, they put people first, they notice things that others miss and use their insight to inspire others.
2. The innovative Product Manager is an INTEGRATIVE THINKER they use analytical processes along with their ability see all the key points and the things that seem to contradict aspects of a problem. They use novel solutions to solve existing and/or emerging problems.
3. Product Managers must be OPTIMISTIC they have an inbuilt believeth that there will be a solution to any given problem.
4. EXPERIMENTALISM: The Product Manager understands that significant innovations don’t come about from small incremental tweaks.
5. COLLABRATION: Product Mangers work along side many people with different disciplines.  They also have more than one discipline themselve.
The innovative Product Manager adds value through observation, insight and understanding.

Related articles:
Successful Product Managers collaborate to ensure innovative product development
How Product Managers can avoid innovation traps #part 1
How Product Managers can avoid the innovation trap #part2
The innovation Value Chain and Product Management

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How to be a better Product Manager

Graham Jones co-founder of Lane4 an international performance development consultancy gives several tips, in his recent article “How the Best of the Best Get Better and Better”, published in this months addition of Harvard Business Review, on improving your management performance – many of the tips are applicable to Product Managers. The article draws several parallels between successful sports and athletics personal. The tips are very applicable to Product Managers.

The first point that Jones puts forward is that the real key to excellence in both the sports and business world is mental toughness and the ability to thrive on pressure.

Loving Pressure
Product Management by its very nature is a job that is highly pressurised. You may be at a trade show and all of sudden the (beta) product your demonstrating gives up the ghost. How do you cope? It’s not always possible to ship spare equipment to annual exhibitions – such a situation will call for the product manager to quickly think on their feet. Or suppose your release gets unexpectedly delayed, a senior stakeholder has promised a major client that new feature in order to secure a purchase order or sponsorship deal– the lucrative deal is under threat and your mail box and voice mail gets flooded by a host of complaints and questions. To add to the pressure your company is desperate for revenue, times are hard – competition is tough.
Jones states that “You can’t stay on top if you aren’t comfortable in high-stress situations. Indeed, the ability to remain cool under fire is the one trait of elite performers that is most often thought of as inborn. But in fact you can learn to love the pressure…” The two tip that Jones gives is to: 
a) learn to compartmentalization – the sports person who loses a match on Monday must be able to put the defeat behind them walk onto the pitch the next day and play with the will to win.
b) Have a secondary passion that you can switch to – a hobby or charity you support. The ability to switch will help you avoid burn-out and therefore succesfully ride the storms of a commercail life.

Reinvent Yourself
I read a number of years ago that feedback was the breakfast of champions. Jones gives an example of Trampolinist Sue Shotton who reinvented her performance and as a result became world champion. One of the things that enabled her to achieve her ambition was her “insatiable appetite for feedback – according to Jones a quality he has seen in all top business performers his worked with. Product Managers who work in an organisation that values ‘lesson learnt’ or ‘scrum retrospectives’ can solicit or create an atmosphere for honest constructive feedback.

Celebrate the Victories
It’s important to celebrate victories but according to Jones it’s vital to be able to identify how and why you were victorious, he says that “The very best performers do not move on before they have scrutinized and understood thoroughly the factors underpinning their success.” It’s important that Product Managers know how and why they’ve achieved success. This gives them a better chance of repeating success at a later date.



Related articles: Ten Steps to Better Product Management

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