Before becoming a product person, I studied microbiology and cell science in college (quite a transition, I know). As a result, I’ve always been intrigued by the concept of a catalyst. In science, a catalyst is an object that increases the frequency of successful collisions in a reaction and lowers the energy required to do so.
But what does that have to do with products? More than you’d imagine, actually. In the ‘science’ of products, a product manager possesses the skills that allow organizations to spend less time and money (lowering energy needed) to create a successful product (reaction).
Within almost any organization, you have people separated into silos, like sales, R&D, marketing and operations. Passing along information and work while driving alignment takes a lot of energy. And it’s understandable because, in the traditional approach, each group has its own goals — and methods for achieving them.
However, many organizations are trying to break down those silos and initiate an InnovationOps approach, which brings together people, processes, and innovation jobs to be done to consistently strive toward a common goal. In many ways, product managers are the key to achieving InnovationOps success. Here are some of the ways they do that.
Innovation feedback
Product managers work with internal and external forces — customers, prospects, stakeholders and regulators — who feed product managers with customer needs to be addressed. From there, product managers share this information with the product development team.
In a traditional product approach, the product manager’s communication might end here, but not in an InnovationOps approach — because, again, it’s all about breaking down information silos. The product manager then collaborates with the product enablement team to create a solution; they work with sales, marketing, operations and even more parts of the organization to ensure everyone knows what the product is and determine how it should be positioned.
Then the solution or enhancement returns to the original set of internal and external forces where hopefully, it makes a positive impact. But, invariably, they uncover new problems that need to be addressed. It’s a continuous circle of communication enabled by technology that makes feedback at each stage accessible, with the product manager as the catalyst.
Value creation
A successful product has a clear line of value creation that everyone should be able to identify. In an InnovationOps approach, product management pros are uniquely positioned to increase the probability of said value. Because product managers have touchpoints with many different stakeholders and personas inside and outside of the organization, they help drive focus and alignment between disparate groups.
From there, product managers have experience connecting outcomes from each group. They can contextualize the overall vision of a product to a wide range of audiences to ensure each group is working toward the same overarching goal instead of focusing on goals specific to their department or an individual team.
And because product managers are involved in every aspect of product communication, they can help guide the organization through trade-off prioritization. They understand which products offer the best probability of value now and which ones should be shelved for later or killed altogether. It’s important to note that the trade-off discussion would occur in a siloed atmosphere in a traditional approach. But with InnovationOps, product managers have gathered and shared information and gotten the necessary feedback to educate a more value-facing decision.
Product health management
The concept of maintaining product health is a relatively new concept, but one that’s essential for product managers working in an InnovationOps approach. Product health could be interpreted in multiple ways, but for our purposes, we’re focusing on how efficiently each stage of the product life cycle is operating to ensure overall success — from discovery and manufacturing to distribution and sales.
Because product managers are so involved in every aspect of the product development process, they can identify potential product health issues at each step. Very often, a product manager can point out how, when and where the organization is over-focusing (and overspending) in a particular area.
For example, the company may aggressively push for velocity when it should dedicate more research to idea development. Such a situation would leave those in the factory with nothing to do because the factory is optimized to create, but the lack of discovery and idea development isn’t generating enough new “raw materials” for the factory. A product manager can step in and share their product health insights with all groups to show why such a push will create issues upon release.
Product thinking evangelism
In an InnovationOps approach where people, processes and innovation jobs to be done come together to liberate organizational knowledge, product managers have the expertise to help move the organization to a product thinking mindset. Such a focus emphasizes users and value through several shifts:
- Output to outcome — Instead of only focusing deadlines and budget, product thinking prioritizes the benefits a product brings to the customers, the organization and even society.
- Company selling to customer buying — Customers make product decisions with more information than ever, and thanks to globalization, they have more options. Product thinking requires organizations to focus more heavily on customer needs instead of developing an innovative idea that may or may not solve a problem.
- Quality assurance to desire and delight — While you want a new product to ship without bugs or defects, product thinking requires organizations to deliver on customers' overall enjoyment and satisfaction and how likely they are to recommend it to others.
In many ways, product managers hold the key to the kingdom — they have expert product knowledge and insight into how key groups operate. And in an InnovationOps approach, those qualities are critical to bringing important, goal-achieving information to the masses.
Want to learn more? I recently hosted an installment of the Sopheon webinar series, Mastering InnovationOps: Product Management as a Catalyst for Success. And learn how Sopheon’s Accolade can supercharge your product management prowess and help simplify an InnovationOps approach.
