With great ideation comes great responsibility

With great ideation comes great responsibility

It’s great fun to come up with a lot of different ideas that your product team can build. But when you practice that sort of ideation without guardrails, you can end up sending your team off on a wild quest to build a lot of things that no one wants. So step away from those sticky notes and Sharpies until you’re sure you’re trying to solve a problem worth solving.

Meanwhile, in product news, a startup accelerator slows down, AT&T learns what happens when you “let it fly” and AI apps are everywhere and they’re even completing your sentences.

Ideation thinking prompts. As a facilitator during any ideation session, Ashley Ann walks a fine line between when to leave things vague and open so that creativity can abound, and when to give people some practical handholds so they can keep ideating. Ashley shares the questions she uses to frame those sessions and create guardrails. For instance, “How might we make a better vase?” will generate very different ideas from “How might we help people enjoy flowers?”

Product innovation: Stop inventing cool sh*t your customers don’t want! Innovation is one of the most important endeavors of modern times. It creates growth for organizations and entire economies, improves customers’ lives, and creates meaning and fulfillment for individuals and teams. But it is hard, and our success rates are mediocre to poor. We know from research and experience that too many organizations still waste their time inventing solutions for non-existent customer needs! Nathan Baird explores why organizations do this and what you can do to avoid falling into the same trap.

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This Week’s Video

A discussion on ideas. Basecamp launches products that so many around the world use and love. But they do it with an unbelievably lean team, considering the scope and scale of their products. In this fireside chat from the Global edition of INDUSTRY: The Product Conference in 2017, Jason Fried uncovers some processes for ideation that he and his team use at Basecamp -- along with other takes on how they build product "The Basecamp Way."

This video, and many more just like it, are available on our Member Hub. If you don’t have access to the Member Hub already, you can join the community today for free.

You can't manage what you can't measure

You can’t manage what you can’t measure. Such a great quote from W. Edwards Deming. (Actually, it wasn’t from Deming – that’s a lie.)

But seriously, for Product Managers – this quote is certainly relevant, isn’t it? Especially these days when everything is moving at lightning speed and data is king.

But why? Well, it's all about making the invisible, visible. Think about it. Every click, every swipe, every little action in your product is a goldmine of info. But if you're not tracking it, it's like it never even happened. That's where setting up the right metrics comes into play. It's like having a GPS for your product's journey, guiding you through the twists and turns of user behavior and market trends, ensuring you're always on the most efficient path to success.

But remember - not all metrics are created equal. It's easy to get sidetracked by flashy numbers that don't mean much for your bottom line. Admit it, you’ve probably used these “vanity metrics'' one way or the other at some point in your career, haven't you? (Don’t worry – we all have). That's why honing in on the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that truly matter for your specific product and your specific company is crucial. It's about finding the signal in the noise.

Embracing a culture of measurement isn't just about being data-driven. It's about being smart, efficient, and, most importantly, keeping your product in tune with what your users want. Remember, in the world of product management, if you're not measuring, you're just guessing.

And we didn’t need Deming to say that for it to be true.

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Techstars to focus on where entrepreneurs already have a support system. Techstars, one of the early startup accelerator programs, announced that as of Fall of 2024, it “will be doubling down on accelerators in cities with the highest concentration of VC activity and other startups to maximize our impact (SF, NY, Boston, LA)”. In other words, it’s closing several of its efforts outside those areas, including Techstars Seattle. The closures are a continued sign of the accelerator’s decline based on a string of strategic decisions in the past few years. Many AT&T customers could not call or text on February 22nd. Around 4 am ET on Thursday, February 22, AT&T customers began reporting widespread internet and cell service outages with the reports spiking around 8 am ET. AT&T said it resolved the issue by late Thursday afternoon. The culprit? It wasn’t a terrorist attack. It was a software update gone wrong. But don’t worry, AT&T is compensating customers $5 for the lost service time. Consider this incident the next time you decide to forgo regression testing. There are too many apps for that. A recent report from Canva and Harris Poll found that 72% of chief information officers (CIOs) are concerned about app sprawl, or the surge of different platforms used in the workplace, especially in terms of the potential security risks and added complexity. That could be a big issue, since, according to the report, 94% of these execs said they plan to up their investments in AI this year, and 84% said there is a glut of AI services available. Something to consider if your roadmap leads you to create a bunch of new AI apps because you can. Google Chrome’s new AI finished this sentence for us. Google has rolled out “Help me Write” — an experimental Gemini-powered generative AI feature for its Chrome browser that aims to help users write or refine text based on webpage content. Following the stable release of Chrome M122, the new writing assistant is now available to try out on Mac and Windows PCs for English-speaking Chrome users in the US. Does this count as one of the too many apps that CIOs are worried about?

The complete guide to product ideation and discovery: Crafting user-centric excellence. Product ideation is generating, developing, and communicating new ideas. In contrast, product discovery refers to a method of deeply understanding customer needs and using this understanding to develop a successful product. Product ideation and product discovery are two vital phases in the journey of successful product development. The folks at Brew Studio dive into the intricacies of both processes, their key players, the role of data, and how they complement each other to create user-centric products.

What innovation really means for product managers. Kent McDonald has a love/hate relationship with the term innovation. Kent loves the idea of taking creative approaches to build a competitive advantage with your product. He hates it when product teams innovate for the sake of innovating, especially when they work on parity products. So Kent explored what the proper use of innovation in product management should look like.

Resources and news curated by Kent J. McDonald.

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