Innovate with Ideas 1st or Needs 1st? Product Managers face a big question: should we start by brainstorming a bunch of ideas and then attempt to iterate our way to product/market fit? Or should we discover the target customers’ unmet needs and then generate solution ideas to address them? Many people advocate generating a lot ...

Differentiate to Win Market Leadership In my last newsletter – The Bezos Strategy (And Yours?): Relentless Focus on Unchanging Needs – I wrote about how Jeff Bezos built Amazon’s strategy “around the things that are stable over time” – i.e., the customers’ unchanging needs – and how you can do this, too. One reader told ...

Why Should I Care About Innovation? You don’t have to be in a competitive market to benefit from innovation. It’s about proactively increasing your relevance and value to customers. Here are seven ways innovation can help you. Be Different: It helps you stand out by offering something new or better than others. Grow: It opens ...

How to Create Winning New Ideas Some people think that startup and new product/service ideas are worthless. That may be true for most of the ideas that come out of traditional brainstorming sessions but there’s been tremendous progress made in our ability to consistently create high value ideas with the Jobs-to-Be-Done (JTBD) process. Motorola, for ...

The Right Kind of Wrong Professor Amy Edmondson of the Harvard Business School makes some good distinctions about the various kinds of failures we all have experienced at work in her new book, The Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well. This caught my attention because the “fail fast and often” mantra has ...

Why Your Customer-Centric Strategy Might Be Failing: A JTBD Perspective Most organizations aspire to be customer-centric. They sincerely want to prioritize their customers’ needs in all aspects of the business. Yet, they often fall short. Why? There are a lot of challenges companies face to become customer-centric but one stands out above all others: how ...

How to Make Products and Services that People Love