You can feel the energy in the room earlier this week as we huddled around a projector at a two-day company offsite. Our company is doubling in size every year, we’re hiring new people all the time and growing interest in more globally competitive innovation and frugal innovation is feeding us an opportunity to become a very large company. The mood is naturally upbeat as we launch the offsite with a review of company performance.

Throughout those two days I must have heard a dozen stories about different customer prospects and what their pains were in the innovation cycle. Though different prospects were interested in specific features, there was a theme that strung across nearly every story.

There’s a fundamental disconnect between product managers and their boss that’s caused from the way the two groups communicate.

• Product managers are most concerned with building products faster, because that’s what’s communicated from the top-down and what they live and breathe every day; requests for more product features than there are resources to develop and tight deadlines.
• Despite the communication from the product manager’s boss about deadlines and features, what keeps your boss up at night is making products that customers want – products that will sell. When 50 percent of product launches are a failure, the risk and pressure are high to deliver.

Neither group is incorrect and both are important issues, but everyone can work a little better if we better understand each other.

Executives can’t have all the features they want – they have to choose based on resources and priorities. Find a way to communicate the tradeoffs and where they might have to give up a feature. Your boss shouldn’t be the only one sweating whether the product will sell. Get in the game, join the discussion, get customer feedback and contribute to getting the RIGHT features into the product.

Even if all you hear from up the chain is pressure to meet deadlines and develop products faster, you can bet if we ask your boss what their biggest concerns are, they’re worried about products that sell.

No doubt you’ve been in meetings where a customer has said something like, “This would be an unbeatable product if only it _______.” I’ll let you fill in the blank.

Unless it’s a top-tier customer with lots of money at stake, the chance of one of these suggestions turning into a product feature is very, very small. Yet, companies receive ideas from customers all the time. And many of them are quite good.

Why? Because customers know what they need from the products they buy.

But even if individual ideas are not feature worthy, combining and analyzing them may reveal trends or needs you hadn’t considered before. And those revelations could lead to some competitive products and capabilities.
Ingredient number 3 in this series on turning innovation into a core business process is simple: Embrace the voice of your customer.

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This post was originally titled Finding a New Way with Your Product Roadmap, but that seemed a tad mundane when you’re trying to imply that the importance of Innovation and Transparency goes beyond Requirements Management.

A little mental-twister and we have a variant of you can’t get there from here because, according to software industry driver, Scott Sehlhorst, most teams have transparency in some, but not all parts of their product innovation process. The benefit to having more transparency can include improved internal stakeholder relationships, increased stakeholder self-perception of roles, and better understanding of customer’s problems so you focus less on a ‘list’ of features to implement. Benefits that can help reach your destination, so you can get “here” instead of “there”.

To learn more, join Scott Sehlhorst at the third of our five-part “How To” Transparency webinar series on Wednesday July 28, 2010 at 10:00 a.m. Pacific, 1:00 p.m. Eastern. Austin-based Scott Sehlhorst created the Tyner Blain management consultancy in 2005, following eight years in mechanical engineering and another eight in artificial intelligence software. His blog, tynerblain.com, is one of the most influential sources of thought leadership in the software development industry.

The series will continue with webinars featuring industry experts Tom Grant and Roy Wildeman of Forrester Research Inc. They will share their real-world anecdotes and best practices to help organizations learn how to define successful products, bring them to market faster, and align product development processes with corporate strategic goals.

You can register for the single webinar or for the whole series on our Product Innovation Management Channel. We look forward to your participation, hope you can attend.

Follow us on Twitter (@accept360) for the latest and greatest information on this Transparency Series.

A talent for bluffing and obfuscation comes in handy when playing poker. If you’re good at it, you can amass a hefty personal fortune.

Now imagine a poker table with marketing, engineering, finance and the Blue Sky team each sitting around trying to outwit one another.

Regrettably, too many companies behave this way when it comes to product innovation and development. Individuals and departments try to win executive favor, budget dollars and personal power at the expense of customer value and company success.

In that kind of environment, product team members will make unilateral decisions… ignore agreed-to decisions… compete against each other… and blame each other. They’ll hold their cards close to the vest by maintaining program data in spreadsheets and static documents, declaring them unavailable to others on the product team.
Innovation expert Paul Sloane has blogged that this kind of internal politics “can reach the ridiculous stage where the enemy is seen as another department inside rather than the competitors outside.”

This situation leads us to the second ingredient in this series of posts on transforming the innovation process: Replace the many truths with a single, shared truth.
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The brainrants blog recently posted on “How to… Retire a Product Gracefully” covering the often painful process of putting a product into its grave. What really caught my attention was the criteria of good reasons to kill a product, because most of them are also cautionary tales on innovation shortcomings that could have been avoided.

The product didn’t sell despite aggressive marketing & advertising. Yup, it’s true. Marketing is important, but there are other factors. Is the product something people want? Does it have features competitors don’t have. Any product that’s selling like hotcakes won’t get retired, so this is really the heart of the matter and if you make the right products at the right time, with the right features, this should (almost) never happen.

Competitors outmaneuvered you. However, that doesn’t mean you can’t catch up. Identify competitive threats early and keep the pace up. Keeping products alive despite aggressive competitors is why fast-paced innovation is so critical.

The product is obsolete. This may be the one circumstance where no amount of innovation can save the product. No matter how great your cassette player is, if you’re really listening to the market you know they don’t want one anymore. Many of our clients have to kill many of their products almost every year, but they keep coming out with the next object of desire.

Retiring a product is often as hard as admitting a big mistake and that mistake might be a decision you were enthusiastic about a year ago. We all make mistakes, and sometimes, you’ll have to take some of Brainrants exit plan tips.