The Myth of the Visionary PM Innovator
While product managers are responsible for driving innovation and delivering delightful products that solve customer needs, too much pressure to come up with innovative ideas can take a toll on their mental and emotional well-being. Counterintuitively, this level of pressure tends to backfire and causes PMs to be less innovative than they could have otherwise been.
Too often, product managers feel that they need to be “disruptors” or “innovators” on their own, without a clear understanding of how collaborative product innovation happens and what their specific role in collaborative product innovation should be.
That's why we've written this guide to product innovation for PMs. Below, we:
Dissect the myth of the innovative PM maverick
Clarify the difference between technical innovation vs. product innovation
Explore product innovation case studies
Share techniques for driving collaborative product innovation across multiple time horizons
Our hope is that this guide will help PMs become more confident and productive in leading innovation. By providing practical advice and actionable tips, we seek to help PMs navigate the challenges of product innovation and deliver successful products that address customer needs, yield customer delight, and capture deep value for the business.
Let’s begin by first busting the myth of “the solo visionary PM.”
The myth of the PM maverick
A widely-held myth about product managers is that they are the sole mastermind behind an innovative product: they’re expected to come up with world-changing ideas on their own, and then they lead their teams to bring these disruptive ideas to life.
However, this conventional wisdom of the PM maverick is wrong on multiple fronts.
In fact, the product ideas that perform the best are the ones that are sourced from customers & teammates, and have been refined across multiple rounds of iteration, debate, and adjustments.
Sitting in a room and coming up with “visionary ideas” on your own does not work, because it:
Fails to account for the needs and pains of customers
Ignores real-world constraints and objectives of the business & its investors
Omits technical implementation details and implications
Dismisses “path dependence” (i.e. what happened in the past affects the present, and what happens today affects the future) and thereby ignoring organic product evolution
But, while the conventional wisdom is incorrect, many of our coaching clients run into imposter syndrome when it comes to product innovation. And, PMs across the industry experience these inflated expectations all of the time.
Problematically, when early-career PMs buy into the myth of the PM maverick, they’re set up to fail because the myth incorrectly puts the onus of innovation on a single person.
Yes, product managers are responsible for leading innovation, but they cannot innovate alone.
Product managers ideally act as a conduit for sourcing ideas and as a forge for remixing and refining these ideas, but they are not the sole ideators within the organization.
The most successful PMs work closely with cross-functional teams e.g. engineering, design, marketing, and sales to gather insights, identify customer needs, and craft innovations that address those needs in delightful ways.
Consider this: the iPhone was not the brainchild of any single person, even though popular culture tends to attribute the accomplishment solely to Steve Jobs.
You may not know this, but Jobs had to be convinced multiple times by engineers, designers, and cross-functional executives that a smartphone was both an excellent business opportunity as well as a desirable consumer product.
To be clear: if Jobs was the only person in charge of coming up with product ideas, the iPhone would not have existed, and Apple likely would not have dominated the smartphone market, which likely would have caused Apple to fail to dominate the wearables market (e.g. AirPods and Apple Watch).
The notion of the maverick PM is not only misguided but also dangerous for companies.
Product innovation requires a range of skills, including market research, UX design, technical knowledge, financial analysis, and go-to-market chops. No single person can possess all these skills, and even the most talented PM benefits from the diverse expertise of their team members. Truly valuable product ideas flourish only by enabling teammates to specialize in their areas of expertise and to bring their perspectives to the table.
Let’s break down some of the ways in which single-person ideation can create intolerable risk for companies:
Blind spots
Bottlenecking
Failure to address customer needs
Failure to account for business constraints
Single-person ideation might lead to blind spots
One of the primary problems with single-person ideation is the presence of blind spots. When only one person is responsible for generating ideas, there is a risk of not identifying higher-leverage opportunities for improvements, or potential constraints & blockers for a given idea. This can result in a suboptimal product that fails to meet customer needs or deliver the desired impact.
Single-person ideation may cause bottlenecks
When all ideas have to flow through one person for approval, the velocity at which we generate new ideas and take action on new ideas will necessarily slow down. When this happens, we miss opportunities, lose revenue, and cause customers to become less satisfied than they otherwise would have been.
In contrast, a collaborative ideation process enables everyone to contribute towards innovation, which means that our products evolve faster than the competition.
Single-person ideation may ignore customers needs
Yet another problem with single-person ideation is the potential disconnect from customer needs and realities. When ideas are generated in a vacuum without input from customers or other stakeholders, we risk investing in solutions that don't actually solve customer pains, which then puts the future of our companies in question.
For example, consider the vast majority of cryptocurrencies and non-fungible tokens (NFTs). Many of these were driven by “founder ideation” without a clear sense of the differentiated value that they would provide to their customers. This lack of focus on customer needs resulted in web3 products that failed to gain traction in the market after the hype died down.
Collaborative cross-functional ideation (including engineering, design, marketing, sales, and support) can help identify customer needs and perspectives, while also identifying technical constraints and limitations. This way, we source a more diverse range of ideas, enabling the team to identify higher-leverage investment opportunities.
Single-person ideation could neglect business constraints
A particularly painful outcome of single-person ideation is “castle in the sky” syndrome, where someone comes up with a grand vision but has no clear plan for bringing the vision to life.
Product managers cannot solely ideate without any basis in reality; they must work within the constraints of the business. These constraints include budget, time, and resource constraints, as well as engineering and design constraints.
While these constraints may seem limiting, they can paradoxically accelerate innovation. Working within constraints can force the team to think creatively and come up with novel solutions. For example, a tight deadline can inspire the team to focus on solving the most critical customer problem and to identify innovative alternatives that otherwise would not have been suggested as part of a less-constrained environment.
We’ve now clarified that product managers are never the sole gatekeepers behind innovation, and that they serve more as orchestrators or conductors rather than as individual contributors. PMs help support teams in coming up with winning ideas.
But before we can provide the playbook for product innovation, we first have to clarify innovation itself to avoid confusion. We’re going to bucket innovation into two broad classes, and we’ll discuss why PMs are responsible for one of these and are not directly responsible for the other.
The two classes of innovation
Not all innovation is product innovation.
Instead, we should categorize innovation into two different buckets, so that we can clarify who is responsible for which type of innovation:
Technical innovation: Novel discoveries of new potential capabilities
Product innovation: Applied implementation of discovered capabilities
Technical innovation is driven by scientists and engineers; product managers might influence the direction of their research & development, but PMs do not directly lead this type of innovation.
In contrast, product innovation is led by product managers; engineers and scientists are crucial to the success of product innovation, but are rarely the “tip of the spear” in identifying which product innovations will unlock customer value and drive business success.
Let’s dig a bit deeper into each class of innovation.
Technical innovation
Consider academic research groups led by professors and corporate research labs led by industry scientists. In these environments, highly-technical experts regularly discover novel capabilities at the frontier of a scientific discipline, e.g. computing, medicine, physics, math, etc.
Research scientists aren’t typically incentivized to drive technical innovation through corporate monetization or through the immediate customer-facing applicability of their research. Instead, they tend to be incentivized to discover technical innovations through paper citations, conference talks, patent grants, or adoption of their open-source repositories.
Technical innovation tends not to be vertical-specific (e.g. finance vs. construction vs. ecommerce); instead, these discoveries tend to be broader at the capability level.
For example, the development of deep learning algorithms is a technical innovation that has transformed the field of natural language processing. This capability has allowed for the development of language models such as GPT-4, Bard, and Bedrock, all of which can generate natural language text with a level of fluency that was previously impossible. Deep learning algorithms have also enabled the development of image recognition technology, which has been used in a range of applications from self-driving cars to medical diagnostics.
Similarly, the development of blockchains as a technical innovation in 1991 by Haber and Stornetta did not immediately start with applications in finance, supply chain management, or healthcare. Their technical focus was on using cryptography to prevent people from tampering with documents, and Haber and Stornetta did not drive the product innovation of bitcoin (as that was led by Satoshi Nakamoto 16 years later, in 2007).
While product managers may recognize the potential of these technical innovations, they are typically not the decision-makers when it comes to the future research direction of these innovations. Instead, product managers are catalysts for converting technical innovation into product innovation.
PMs may have some influence over future research directions based on their insights from current customers and competitors, but they usually won’t have a sufficiently deep technical foundation to identify the specific technical bottlenecks to break through. Instead, product managers will typically consume existing capabilities and deploy them into product innovations, which we discuss further below.
Keep in mind that technical innovation and research tends not to turn into market-viable products on their own. For example, Google’s Imagen Video research enables scientists to use text prompts to create high definition videos without any additional input such as user-recorded videos; but, these capabilities are not available for public usage or monetization.
That said, in some cases technical innovation might bleed into applied product innovation, especially when scientists are customer-facing.
For example, Amazon’s Machine Learning Solutions Lab works with customers like NASA (space), the NFL (sports), Roche (medicine), and Capcom (gaming) to both unlock new technical capabilities as well as implement novel products based on these research discoveries. In cases like these, product managers will work directly with applied scientists to establish the research direction for specific customer use cases and implementations.
Product innovation
Product innovation, on the other hand, is focused on the novel implementation of existing capabilities; this class of innovation is primarily driven by constraints such as customer needs, design and engineering abilities, and business objectives.
Product innovation is rarely driven by unsolved technical challenges. The focus is on applying existing capabilities to address specific customer problems and deliver scalable solutions that meet their needs.
For example, consider Intercom’s chatbot product Fin. Intercom did not come up with their own deep learning algorithms to create a user-facing chatbot; instead, they built on top of the technical innovation of OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
Fin uses ChatGPT’s natural language processing to understand customer queries and respond with helpful information, with a tightly defined scope around existing help center articles.
The product team for Fin specifically focused on a couple of key pains:
Reduce setup times to virtually zero, rather than having to task ML engineers with ingesting proprietary content
Eliminate potentially inaccurate responses and prevent loss-of-trust from end users
Enable customer support teams to delegate away “low-value asks” (e.g. how to change a reservation, what button to click, when the business’s operating hours are, etc.) so that they can focus on higher-complexity and higher-value customer support initiatives
Or, consider how Nestlé implemented blockchain to drive transparency in their supply chain for their consumers. Nestlé did not develop their own blockchain from scratch; instead, they focused on repurposing blockchain general capabilities for the specific customer pain of “how do we know that what you’re selling was ethically sourced?”.
While technical innovations may be exciting, they often don't make it to market because they’re not directly connected to solving customer pain or business objectives. Technical innovations tend not to be viable in the market on their own because they aren’t designed to be viable in the market on their own.
Product innovations, on the other hand, are shipped with the specific intent of addressing customer needs and business needs within real-world constraints.
PMs are responsible for this process of converting technical innovations into product innovations. They must work closely with cross-functional teams to understand the capabilities of the technology and identify opportunities for implementation. They must also work with customers to understand their pain points and design solutions that meet their needs.
For example, the discovery of machine learning algorithms for natural language processing may not directly solve a customer pain point. However, by leveraging these algorithms to create a chatbot that can answer customer questions and resolve issues, a product company can have a significant impact on customer satisfaction and retention.
Similarly, blockchain technology has the latent potential to transform industries like finance, supply chain management, and healthcare; but, it doesn’t solve problems right out of the gate.
The true transformation lies in the novel implementations of blockchain technology that can solve specific customer pain points, such as streamlining supply chain logistics or improving patient data privacy.
Of course, we could add more nuance to product innovation if we so choose. For example, the book Ten Types of Innovation (authored by University of Chicago adjunct professors and Deloitte consultants) breaks down product innovation into 10 separate categories:
Monetization, e.g. subscriptions vs. pay-as-you-go vs. freemium vs. ad-supported
Partnerships & crowdsourcing
Organizational structures
Company processes
Product feature set
Product ecosystem & product portfolio
Associated services e.g. deployments, training, support
Distribution channels
Company brand-building e.g. product-led growth, case studies, testimonials
Customer engagement e.g. loyalty programs, referrals, communities
However, for the sake of this guide, we won’t tackle product innovation at such a granular level, as this level of granularity doesn’t fundamentally change the way in which product managers should drive product innovation.
Why differentiating between technical vs. product innovation matters
The main difference between technical innovation and product innovation is the level of applicability.
Technical innovation is focused on unlocking new capabilities that can drive product development but are not themselves applicable to customers or problems, while product innovation is focused on applying existing capabilities to solve specific customer problems and meet business objectives.
Product managers should not need technical masters degrees or PhDs in engineering to drive product innovation. When PMs are incorrectly forced to lead technical innovation - whether forced by others or forcing themselves to do so - both customers and companies suffer from unnecessary issues.
Let’s now analyze a handful of real-world case studies on product innovation that unlocked significant market value without needing to simultaneously drive technical innovation.
Product innovation real-world case studies
We’ll cover five real-world case studies of product innovation:
Notion
Robinhood
Kickstarter
Wikipedia
Lemonade
Notion makes collaborative document creation easier
Notion is a great example of product innovation; they did not invent new technical capabilities like markdown text editing or large language models, but instead pulled together existing technologies to make collaborative document creation easier. Notion's product innovation is based on a deep understanding of customer needs and the application of existing capabilities to solve specific customer problems.
One key challenge with collaborative document creation is the need to work across multiple tools, such as word processors, spreadsheets, and project management software. Notion recognized this pain point and developed a solution that integrates and standardizes all of these tools into one platform, making it easier for teams to collaborate on documents and projects.
By bringing together existing capabilities, such as rich text editing, project management tools, and data visualization, Notion has created a novel implementation that solves a specific customer pain point.
Furthermore, traditional documentation software required multiple clicks to set up tables, formatting, and other time-intensive tasks. Notion eliminated this burden by shipping UX like “/commands”, which lets users quickly find the exact content or formatting they’re looking for through a typeahead search bar.
Notion's product innovation is not about inventing new technical capabilities, but about applying existing capabilities in a way that meets the needs of customers and drives business growth.
Notion's success is a testament to the power of product innovation. By focusing on solving customer pain points and developing novel implementations of existing capabilities, Notion has been able to create a product that is loved by its users and has driven significant business growth, with a valuation of $10 billion in 2021.
Robinhood enables consumers to buy stocks with no commissions
Robinhood is an excellent example of product innovation in the financial industry. Without having to spin up a new stock exchange or having to invent new technical capabilities like webhooks & data streaming, Robinhood enabled everyday consumers to buy stocks, options, ETFs, and other financial vehicles with no commissions or account minimums, which empowered them to join the ranks of highly-sophisticated institutional investors.
One of the key challenges with investing in the stock market is the high fees and minimums associated with buying and selling stocks, making it difficult for small investors to get started.
Robinhood recognized this pain point and developed a solution that eliminates fees for stock trading. Instead of monetizing off of stock trades, Robinhood monetizes by both earning interest on deposits from users, as well as selling user data to market makers like Citadel. And, by sharing investment ideas to help users identify what trades to make, they remove friction from the decision-making process.
By implementing these product innovations, Robinhood leveraged existing technical capabilities (e.g. stock exchanges, payment processing platforms, asset price charts, recommendation algorithms, etc.) to IPO at $32 billion in 2021.
Kickstarter empowers creators to crowdfund new projects
Kickstarter transformed the way creative projects are funded and brought to life, all through product innovation rather than technical innovation. By leveraging existing technical capabilities like payment processing platforms and webforms, Kickstarter has created a platform that builds a community around projects by leveraging an “all-or-nothing” project funding structure.
One of the key pain points in creative projects is access to capital and customers. Traditional funding sources such as grants and bank loans can be difficult to access, and there is often no guarantee that a project will succeed. Kickstarter’s solution leverages the power of crowdfunding to give creators access to a community of fans, who serve as both capital and customers of the project.
The Kickstarter platform enables creators to post project proposals and set funding goals, with backers pledging money towards a project if it meets its funding goal. If a project does not meet its funding goal, no money is exchanged, and the project is not funded. And, if the project is funded, backers receive perks based on the size of their contributions.
Another innovative feature of Kickstarter's product is its focus on building a community around projects. By enabling backers and creators to interact with one another through comments and updates, Kickstarter creates a sense of shared ownership and investment in the success of projects. These features have helped to build a loyal and engaged user base that is committed to the success of the platform and the projects it supports.
Kickstarter has also leveraged existing recommendation algorithm technologies to create a more personalized user experience. The platform helps users to discover and explore projects based on their interests and browsing history, and to receive personalized recommendations for projects to back. By doing so, Kickstarter built a diverse and vibrant community of creators and backers, united by a shared passion for bringing creative projects to life.
Overall, Kickstarter's product innovation has unlocked new ways to enable creators to kick off new projects and new businesses by providing them with access to capital and customers that they did not have before. By the start of 2023, Kickstarter had driven a total of $7.2+ billion in pledges from 21.5+ million backers to fund 230,000+ projects.
Wikipedia enables encyclopedic knowledge crowdsourcing
Wikipedia leveraged product innovation to fundamentally change how encyclopedic knowledge is shared and documented, without being blocked on coming up with their own technical innovations or patents. By leveraging existing technologies such as plaintext markdown editors and activity logs, Wikipedia established a platform that enables crowdsourcing of knowledge at scale with accuracy and traceability.
Traditional sources of information such as physical encyclopedias can quickly become outdated, verifying information accuracy across multiple sources can be difficult, and physical books are heavy, expensive, and inconvenient for mobile-first users.
Wikipedia's product innovation granted any user the ability to create and edit articles, with changes tracked in real-time using an activity log. By giving the entire community full transparency of who has edited what, Wikipedia drives accountability while also enabling the knowledge base to be continually updated to reflect the latest information in the world.
By reassembling existing technologies into a novel product context, Wikipedia has left a permanent positive mark on the world, with 26 billion page views every month.
Lemonade provides self-serve and transparency to insurance
Lemonade, an insurtech (insurance technology) company, is another excellent example of product innovation built on top of existing technologies like APIs, pricing engines, and risk models. Lemonade shipped a platform that eliminates friction for consumers and eliminates manual back office processes by enabling self-serve insurance quotes and purchases, and this product innovation has disrupted the traditional insurance industry and attracted a younger, more tech-savvy customer base.
A key challenge in traditional insurance is the lengthy and often confusing application process. Lemonade recognized this and developed a solution that simplifies the process through the use of technology. The company's platform allows customers to receive a quote and purchase insurance in a matter of minutes, without the need for a live phone call or an in-person appointment with an insurance agent.
Lemonade has also deployed artificial intelligence and machine learning to provide customized insurance policies that are tailored to the needs of individual customers. For example, the platform can adjust coverage based on a customer's living situation or the value of their possessions.
Another innovative feature of Lemonade's product is its giveback program. The company takes a fixed percentage of premiums and uses them to support various causes that are important to its customers. By doing so, Lemonade has created a unique value proposition that appeals to socially conscious customers, without needing to file new patents or come up with bleeding-edge technical advancements.
By focusing on practical product innovations to eliminate manual processes in a traditionally paper-heavy industry, Lemonade went public in 2020 at a $3.7 billion valuation.
We’ve now looked at five examples of successful product innovation driven by collaborative product teams. Let’s now walk through a playbook for how you can lead product innovation within your own organizations and teams.
The PM playbook for leading product innovation
Product innovation operates differently for different time horizons. For this playbook on leading product innovation, let’s first break down product innovation into three timespans:
Short-term (between one week to one year into the future)
Medium-term (between one year to three years into the future)
Long-term (more than three years into the future)
Our overarching advice:
Short-term product innovation should be convergent and act immediately on known customer needs
Medium-term product innovation should be divergent and explore trends & capabilities in adjacent industries to solve new customer needs
Investing in long-term technical innovation makes more sense than investing in long-term product innovation
Let’s elaborate on each below.
Short-term product innovation converges on known pain
Short-term product innovation is all about delivering value to customers and capturing value for the business from our current position in the marketplace. Our goal is to converge on known customer needs and quickly knock them out in a scrappy manner.
The four keys to short-term product innovation:
A diverse source of product ideas from customers and cross-functional teams
The ability to reshape feature requests and product ideas to maximize ROI, rather than simply taking orders from customers or leadership
Scrappy execution under tight deadlines and constraints, rather than bloated “visionary projects”
Psychological safety, i.e. a culture where failure isn’t feared
You’ll notice that these four keys are no different from empowered product discovery! In essence, any truly empowered product team that iteratively ships hypotheses and uses agile to learn from their customers is already driving product innovation in this first time horizon.
When we have a diverse source of product ideas (e.g. through customer feedback, market research, competitive analysis, and cross-functional collaboration), we can incorporate diverse perspectives and ideas and identify higher-leverage opportunities for solving customer pains.
But crucially, we also need to have the ability as product managers to reshape feature requests. If we’re operating under a delivery-oriented project management model where product requirements are dictated by internal executives or external customers, we lose the ability to innovate.
Instead, if we have the empowerment to interview our customers for the pain that they’re experiencing, rather than being forced to build exactly what they’ve asked for, we can come up with uniquely delightful alternative approaches from a product perspective, an engineering perspective, and a design perspective.
And, by evaluating higher-impact and lower-cost alternatives, we can establish a compelling business case for why a given solution makes sense to prioritize over other ongoing initiatives.
For example, say that one of your customers demands that you build cascading permissions and roles for every feature within your product.
You know that this functionality is complex, prone to errors, and difficult for customers to use in the long run, and you have a hunch that they raised this demand to you because they recently ran into a painful gap within your product that other customers might also benefit from.
Instead of simply giving them a “yes” or a “no” to this feature demand at face value, ask “what problem are you trying to solve?” from the perspective of a user interview.
Your customer might say, “I'm tired of having random calendar events deleted without my knowledge, so I want to restrict other people from deleting my events.”
By taking this insight back to your design and engineering counterparts, your product pod identifies an innovative alternative. Instead of shipping a permissions & roles paradigm, you can ship a lightweight email notification about deleted events to the event owner, and include information about who deleted the event.
This work only takes a couple of weeks to complete, and easily scales to all of your other customers, rather than a custom-built set of permissions that works only for a single customer.
By pitching this tightly-scoped alternative to your customer and sharing that you can get it done for them in less than a month, they no longer have to wait for you to spend multiple quarters building and testing roles & permissions! Instead, within just a couple of weeks, they will never again have to worry about events vanishing from their calendar without their knowledge.
This type of lightning-fast product innovation cycle drives customer love, leading to stickiness and viral growth.
This leads to our third point: implementing product ideas under tight constraints (e.g. business objectives, customer needs, technical limitations, deadlines) helps us stay lean and focused, where we build just exactly what’s needed to solve customer pain and capture business value, and nothing more.
Being forced to prioritize the single most crucial initiative, rather than having the luxury of shipping a dozen lower-value initiatives, helps PMs drive critical mass in the market and secure viral success.
Through ruthless prioritization, we ship tightly-focused products that tend to win deeper product adoption for targeted customer segments. On the flip side, when we seek instead for our products to be “all things for all people,” our products tend to get lukewarm reactions.
Therefore, when a single product manager works across 10-30 engineers at once, their features tend to become quite bloated, without a deeply opinionated perspective on what the true core value proposition is for the next release.
But, when a single product manager is constrained to working with only 2-4 engineers at a time, they tend to ship highly opinionated products that unlock deep value at low cost.
However, inappropriate constraints can wind up stifling innovation; when constraints are enforced through fear, our teams become conservative and risk-averse. Therefore, the fourth key is that short-term product innovation requires psychological safety without fear of failure.
Not all initiatives will be successful. Product managers are explorers who are shipping hypotheses and learning from the market, rather than financial forecasters who have 100% certainty that a given feature will reap a specific revenue number.
Leadership should not punish product teams for testing hypotheses that don’t hit predetermined metric targets. Instead, they should celebrate product teams for driving swift iterative learning that changes the long-term arc of the company.
Through the four keys of diverse idea sourcing, ability to reshape solutions, tight constraints, and psychological safety, we drive product innovation in the short term by converging on high-ROI solutions for known customer pains.
Medium-term product innovation unlocks divergent value
When tackling product innovation in the medium term, we should not solely focus on the current known set of pains that customers have raised to us. Medium-term innovation should not be based on simple A/B testing for minor optimization of metrics, as that causes a local optimization where we may wind up missing larger global gaps & improvements.
Instead, we should be solving previously unaddressed customer pains, enabling us to drive a step-function difference in the trajectory of our businesses. We need to draw inspiration from elsewhere, as staying close to “current realities” causes us to lose sight of creative approaches.
To discover novel solutions to not-yet-raised customer pains, we’ll use two different techniques for medium-term product innovation: the innovation safari technique, and the X for Y technique.
Innovation safari technique
The innovation safari technique is a method that we can use as PMs to inspire new product ideas, with a focus on products that we enjoy using rather than looking at competitors and their feature sets.
During the innovation safari, we ask our teammates to consider 3-5 different products in their own lives; these teammates should include engineering, design, sales, marketing, customer success, and customer support.
By looking at completely different verticals, use cases, and implementations, we can creatively bring key elements of these products into our own products to drive innovation. We don’t want to look at what competitors have already shipped or plan to ship, because they will likely be shipping incremental changes that don’t unlock new dimensions of value for their customers.
Essentially, we seek to avoid the “echo chamber” effect, where all players in an industry converge on the same feature set as they mimic one another (think Uber vs. Lyft, or Doordash vs. Grubhub, or Instagram Reels vs. TikTok vs. YouTube Shorts).
Think of the innovation safari technique as working backwards: we’re looking at how others have already implemented product innovation in different contexts in the real world, and then we work backwards to identify how we could adapt and apply this innovation to our own contexts.
By studying products outside of your domain or industry, you can take inspiration from market-tested ideas and bring them into your product, leading to increased customer stickiness and stronger long-term business growth.
For example, let’s look at how a field service SaaS platform (e.g. invoicing and scheduling for pest control, cleaning services, lawn care, etc.) might draw inspiration from products outside of this vertical.
First, you might look at Google Docs and its multiplayer editing feature, where multiple users can interact at the same time within the same Google Doc to divide and conquer.
You could consider how this capability could be applied to enterprise collaboration & planning for larger projects like construction and maintenance, where different parties might collaboratively fill out their quotes, estimates, and availability.
Then, you might look at Salesforce and its activity logging feature, where it logs and timestamps every field change, with attribution to each of the users who created and saved these changes.
You could consider how this capability might help you deliver transparency to consumers and service providers by creating a communications log that centralizes email, SMS texts, and in-person notes in a single place.
Afterwards, you could draw inspiration from Tinder's left-and-right swipe feature that enables users to quickly evaluate potential romantic interests with minimal physical effort.
You could brainstorm ideas on how you could use a similar left-and-right swipe paradigm within an on-the-go mobile app for service providers to help them quickly update the tasks that they’ve already completed, or to help them accept & reject available tasks from a pool of tasks.
Finally, you could analyze how Lemonade drives delightful customer self-serve in the insurance industry with transparency into insurance pricing.
From there, you might use this spark of inspiration to find ways to let end consumers self-serve configure their own projects so that they can get price quotes and estimated timelines from service providers, all without having to pick up the phone to call an assortment of individual providers for manual quotes.
Conversely, if this field service platform had simply shipped what competitors shipped, it likely would have fallen into the trap of shipping non-differentiating features.
For example, competitors in this space tend to ship “task lists, reminders, and deadlines for teams” or “additional settings & validation rules for initial customer intake forms”, which are obvious, low-effort, and rarely create moats of long-lasting differentiation.
Innovation safaris are powerful for driving innovation in the medium term, as it encourages our cross-functional teams to consider ideas outside of our verticals and seek inspiration from unexpected places.
X for Y technique
A complementary innovation technique we can leverage as PMs is the "X for Y" technique, which enables us to identify existing technical capabilities and reimplement them in novel contexts to unlock unique product value.
This method begins with a technical capability inventory; that is, we ask our engineers and designers to raise existing technical capabilities that we have as an organization that have not yet been implemented within our specific products. The idea is to identify additional applications of current technical capabilities to expand our product’s functionality.
Think of this approach as working forwards. Your technical counterparts already know the technical capabilities that you have available at your fingertips as an organization, and now we’re looking for novel ways to apply these existing capabilities to solve customer problems within business constraints.
We call this “X for Y” because we’re looking at how to reuse an existing capability X within a new product context Y. For example, let’s say that we’re working within the digital loan origination space, where consumers can apply for mortgages online.
We probably already have the capability to pre-populate personal information for users (e.g. first name, last name, email address) through integrations like single-sign on.
What if we could pre-populate different kinds of information instead? For example, by integrating with credit bureaus, we could pre-populate this applicant’s outstanding monthly payments without having to ask them to manually look them up and fill them in.
Or, by integrating with automated home property valuation models, we could pre-populate the applicant’s current estimated market value for their home. That way, we don’t have to ask them to try to recall what their initial purchase price was, and we don’t have to risk them abandoning our workflow to look up home prices on Zillow or Redfin.
The existing capability X here is “form pre-population”, and the product context Y here is “monthly payments” or “property value” instead of “personal info.”
Or, let’s say that we’re working on a digital application workflow for a government agency, e.g. marriage applications or driver’s license renewals.
Imagine that we already have some capability for our IT teams to “look over the shoulder” of our customer service agents and see what’s on their screen remotely, which lets us debug any issues they run into as they work through customer info intake.
What if we reused this capability to let customer service agents see what’s on the screen of their customers remotely, so that they could help get their customers unstuck with particularly difficult questions within the digital form? That way, customers no longer need to come into the physical location of the government agency to get their questions answered for completing their applications.
Here, the existing capability X is “remote screen control,” and the product context Y is “customer service agents helping customers” instead of “internal engineering teams helping customer service agents.”
Perhaps you already have a WYSIWYG (“what you see is what you get”) editor to let customers visually preview how the settings in your SaaS software will impact their workflows.
What if you reimplemented this editor to let your customers’ engineers visually preview how their API calls might interact with your product, so that they can build integrations much faster with significantly fewer errors?
By using the "X for Y" technique, we empower our technical counterparts to deploy existing capabilities in novel ways that drive business value.
Avoiding the trap of long-term product innovation
In the 3 to 10 year time span, industries and technologies tend to evolve in dramatic and unexpected ways. Due to this fact, we advocate for prioritizing technical innovation over product innovation for this particular time span.
For example, consider machine learning. In the late 2010’s, most machine learning experts predicted that machine learning would automate away low-creativity tasks e.g. long-haul truck driving and would not be able to automate high-creativity tasks e.g. writing and drawing.
Yet, in 2023, machine learning is extraordinarily successful at writing, to the point where high school teachers are concerned that their students will use machine learning to write essays for them. And, machine learning is impressive at the visual arts; just look at the kind of art that Midjourney and Stable Diffusion can produce.
And perplexingly, machine learning has not gotten much better at enabling self-driving cars.
In 3 to 10 years, new waves of technical innovation will have matured, which means that the available space of product innovation will fundamentally change in that timespan. Therefore, efforts to establish product innovations for those timespans will almost always be outdated.
That’s not to say that we shouldn’t be considering the long-term! But, instead of considering product innovations for the long-term, ask technical counterparts to consider technical innovations for this time horizon.
They’ll have a clearer sense of the kinds of ways in which things might change at that point; for example, internet browsers may become cookie-free, or integrations may no longer require engineering effort due to large language models being able to automatically call the right APIs, or consumers may no longer have dedicated computers and instead use an assortment of smart devices and wearables to navigate their use of day-to-day technology.
Closing thoughts
Instead of separating out “product innovation” as a distinct category of activities that only “visionary PMs” can tackle, we should consider collaborative product innovation as part-and-parcel of product management at any level of seniority, within any product scope.
Successful product innovation requires heavy teamwork, because the only innovations that win are the ones that simultaneously create outsized customer value, capture outsized business value, unlock synergies across the product portfolio and the tech stack, and empower functions across the organization to own successful go-to-market strategies.
No single person can address all of these dimensions on their own!
And, keep in mind that every product manager is an innovator, even if you don’t feel that way yet.
Here’s why: no idea is truly new.
Instead, product innovation is all about remixing existing ideas in new contexts in a way that uniquely solves customer pain while creating business value.
We hope this guide on product innovation has provided you with the fundamentals for driving thoughtful innovation, and that you no longer feel like you need to come up with disruptive new ideas on your own.
We urge you to lean on your team and your broader organization; they’ll help you come up with truly delightful innovations for your customers!
Thank you to Pauli Bielewicz, Mary Paschentis, Goutham Budati, Markus Seebauer, Juliet Chuang, and Kendra Ritterhern for making this guide possible.
