After watching one of the most impactful TED speeches by Steven Johnson, I went out and bought his book, Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation.  I must admit that my impulsivity overtook my usual anti-consumer inclination as I wasn’t convinced this book would matter.  There are way too many books and ideas that have been written about innovation – what it is, the most innovative organizations, how you cultivate it. But I must recommend this book to anyone who would ever define their mind to be creative.  Think of the many ways someone can be creative - if you seek a new route to work, a faster way to load your dishwasher, a less laborious method to shovel the snow or even a more efficient way to perform your business activities.

It’s especially resonant for people in business, in my case this is very applicable to product management. He presents ideas on how organizational environments cultivate good ideas – how gathering people from different departments or business functions can facilitate problem-solving; how creating the right physical spaces such as whiteboards, open work environments, desks facing each other and privacy inhibitors can inspire people to design better.  

He contends that ideas are romanticized to be these Eureka moments (think Isaac Newton sitting underneath the apple tree and then he theorizes the law of gravitation) where in most cases they are part of a network of ideas.  He believes that the breakthroughs of our history happened through incremental ideas building on each other. “We have a natural tendency to romanticize breakthrough innovations, imagining momentous ideas transcending their surroundings…We take the ideas we’ve inherited or that we’ve stumbled across, and we jigger them together into some new shape.”

As a direct example, I took on the role of a product manager not through some light bulb flashing over my head but rather incremental developments.  I transitioned from a sales capacity to my current post but this required a long process that started with my learning of our competitor’s products superficially, then seeing product demos and subsequently trying their products.  I quickly found out that I had a knack for research, competitive analysis and improving our products/services/positioning. And to spare you all the details, I eventually became a product manager.  Moreover, my firm Unilytics, had it’s own renaissance as a software maker very incrementally; it all started innocently enough; we had a customer that detested the default and custom reports offered in current analytics packages and wanted something more specific and intuitive.  So, we created a very simple Excel-based dashboard as a prototype and with their encouragement that this was a good start we were motivated.  Since then we’ve created a very successful web analytics dashboard application called Montage that is much more sophisticated and saves our customers money, time, labor and more importantly addresses a major business deficiency - poor reporting which means poor results!

As product managers we are charged with conceiving new ideas and I am sure as many of you know, our ideas are almost always the result of people building on other’s ideas and having a fertile environment in which they can cultivate.  As Johnson mentions innovative environments need to be “liquid networks” that are flexible enough to facilitate dynamic connections between good ideas, but structured enough to support and hold them.

The author identifies the key aspects of our cultural environment that foster innovation, and the recurring patterns that produce great ideas to fruition. He believes that urban environments and technology are potent fertilizers of discovery and invention, and that the connections between people and their ideas are the underlying seed beds of innovation.

The author identifies a number of conditions that enable innovation. One is the “adjacent possible”.  The idea that what is achievable today is a by-product of the various combinations of events and activities that have occurred prior.

Here is a quick example of innovation: in the 1870s, a French doctor named Stephane Tarnier, saw incubators for chicken hatchlings at the Paris Zoo and hired the zoo’s poultry-raiser to build incubator boxes for premature newborns at his hospital. Other hospitals at the time were using devices to keep babies warm, but Tarnier was the first to conduct research showing how incubators significantly reduced the infant mortality rate, leading to their widespread use in Paris and beyond.

A more contemporary and universal example of the adjacent possible, is YouTube. If it was launched 10 years earlier, it would have failed because most people connecting to the Internet were still on slow dial-up connections that could not have handled video sharing. But by the time YouTube launched, more people had high-speed connections.  Think of Foursquare or Instagram in the same paradigm.

One of the most common inquiries I get on my blogs or in my LinkedIn Inbox are messages from fellow salespeople seeking advice on how to make the move over to product management. So, I thought it easier to refer people to a blog rather than respond in long and often back-and-forth emails.

For the past three years, my career has evolved in ways that I didn’t intend for it.  I am specifically referring to my main title slowly turning from Account Executive (read sales and nothing Executive) to Product Manager almost with little or no intervention on my own part.  Many of my customers, colleagues and business partners wondered how this happened as it seemed puzzling to them; I explain that being a sales person makes you a product manager in some ways - how?

Well, considering some of the core duties of a product manager*:

• Solicit customer feedback; implement feedback
• Present products via demos, webinars or meetings
• Collaborate with cross-functional groups such as development, marketing, sales, management

• Entrepreneurial mindset
• An excellent communicator and with strong relationship building skills with all levels within an organization; outstanding presentation and speaking skills
• Outstanding in their attention to detail and organizational abilities with the ability to troubleshoot and provide guidance and solutions
• Deeply knowledgeable of industry
• Driven
• An excellent personality negotiator with the a keen sense of aligning all parties along the same path

With organizations becoming increasingly sophisticated with their web analytics initiatives so should management and owners of web analytics.  For many companies the question that arises is who is responsible for the web site and analytics.  Spurring this introspection is the fact that market research currently shows that Marketing owns web analytics 46% of the time, while traditionally IT owns responsibility of implementing tagging required to populate report data.

Have you ever run into any of the following issues in your web analytics implementation:

• “Where is my data?” or “How is that calculated?”
• Difficulty obtaining budget approvals due to lack of ROI calculations
• “Trial and error” changes. For example, putting in changes, finding out they’re wrong, and then having to back them out
• Analytics stalls because business and technology don’t know how to communicate their needs

Naturally, there can be a bottleneck when Marketing makes requests for reports or additional functionality especially when only one person manages web analytics.  Moreover, there needs to be a discussion on the four pillars of governance: accountability, accessibility, community and uniformity. These pillars address topics such as covering reporting responsibility, ensuring data is accurate, available and standardized, etc.

This is what we call Web Analytics Governance and it is gaining some steam and rightly so.  Governance is:

• The management of people, technology, and processes toward a common goal.
• The process of installing, configuring, managing, and utilizing the web analytics platform.
• Encompasses the way in which the business consumes and actions the web analytics data.
• Includes the feedback loop from the business back to the web analytics platform for enhancements or changes.

By establishing a strong governance model companies can eliminate inefficiencies, overlapping of roles, and establish key roles for a successful analytics deployment.

For more info, please see here:

The one-size fits all approach to evaluating social media efforts is broken. Most products focus on aggregating raw numerical data such as followers, fans, mentions (volume) and click activity. These numbers in isolation are misleading and do not help you evaluate or properly justify your social marketing spend.

Since it’s important to better understand where social efforts are succeeding, web analytics must focus on tying those social media interactions to actual business value. Business value would relate to interactions that are significant and related to your business needs. (See: Unilytics KPI Karta for information about building well designed Key Performance Indicators that will provide feedback directly related to your business needs and goals.) How can we identify and segment the raw numerical data for social media and derive real value?
 

Your resulting reports can be configured to display a wide range of information about the direct impact of social media activities, the viral aspect of certain campaigns, the propensity for people to share your content and the ability to drill down to the lowest level of reasonable divisions.

Although this post is very high level, hopefully it will give you pause to think about how much more accurate and actionable you can be with your social media data.

The Five pillars of a Good product Manager: 

1. Creator/Builder 

2. Intellectually curious

3. Problem solver

4. Collaborator 

5. Improver

Creator/Builder 

A good PM needs to have a creator’s instincts. Do any of these apply to you:

·   You have a lot of worthwhile ideas

·   You derive satisfaction from building something rather than implementing someone else’s plan or idea

·   You strive to be original or standout

·   You believe in yourself to take calculated risks

·   You are entrepreneurial

·   You are a divergent thinker

·   You are inspired

·   Influential

Now discover a product that is useful, usable, and feasible!

Intellectually Curious

Foundational to product management is resonating with these types of questions/statements:

·   Hmm, I wonder why this [business process or product] isn’t attaining it’s desired effect?

·   I am noticing that this type of customer is really happy with our [service or product]. What do you they have in common and how do we duplicate that?

·   Wow, this is a huge deficiency/gap in the marketplace. Let’s plug it.

·   With this [research] I know I can unite marketing, sales and technology on my vision.

·   If we developed this product we’d be industry leaders.

 
Money never starts an idea.  It is always the idea that starts the money.  ~Owen Laughlin

Problem Solver

You have a knack for turning problems into solutions. 

·   Have you uncovered a quicker way to work by testing different routes?

·   Have you realized a way to organize your closet to maximize space?

·   Have you figured out a way to beat your buddy in tennis after a long losing streak?

·   Are you one of those rare employees that identify inefficiencies at work and a way to solve them?

·   Do you recognize patterns, see the whole picture and grasp solutions with only a few pieces?

·   Are you good at puzzles?

My guess? You are very analytical!

Collaborator

If you are a collaborator then you’re energetic, an excellent communicator and team player.

·   You can influence people of your ideas. You can unify internal stakeholders on your vision.

·   You are a part-marketer, part-technologist, part-sales person

·   You are a Master of Ceremonies in the boardroom; able to control and direct the dialogue on its intended course, while ensuring that all voices are heard.

·   You know how to empower people - you can draw gems from even the shyest, least confident person in your meetings.

·   Even though you are trying to convince others, you do this under the veil of ‘exchanging ideas’ rather than dictating.

·   Your constituents leave meetings feeling like they are significant contributors and valuable to the process.

·   Customers greatly appreciate that you are making an investment in them. How? Because you seek product feedback; you call them and see how your product is saving them money and performing it’s desired purpose; you implement their feedback in your product redevelopment.

·   You understand that strategies are cross-functional initiatives. It is one piece of a bigger puzzle. Without the buy-in from each and every business function, your plans run the risk of not meeting their objective.

***Your developers like you because they are working on a satisfying projects; marketing is happy as your ideas are turning into leads for the company; you are the best friend of sales as they are making good $; management has their eye on you!

Improver

A key ingredient to the product management lifecycle is improving and enhancing. It starts with customer feedback. 
 

·   You need to know why your customers chose you instead of your competitor

·   How has this saved them money?

·   How does save them time? What would they have done instead?

·   What aspects of the product would they change? This will be valuable for engineering to address ahead of next release.

·   Drawing on feedback you can be effective at ‘partnering’ with engineering on timelines for bug fixes, UI improvements, release candidates and support.

·   With good feedback, marketing understands how to position products, how to write brochures, where to acquire leads, what social channels to exploit.

·   You can use your new learning to educate sales on the unique advantages of your products, why you are better than your competitor, and who your ideal audience is.

Imagine, Create, Inspire, Enhance

Good Luck!