Most product executives are constantly struggling to match their product investments to their companies’ innovation goals.

Join us on Wednesday for the fourth of our five-part webinar series on Transparency, and you can learn how you can maximize your return on product investments by developing the right products for the right markets at the right time, all the time. In this webinar, Roy Wildeman, Senior Analyst at Forrester Research, Inc., will discuss Product Portfolio trends and highlight best practices for better, faster, more effective product development.
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My previous post in this series described a method for making data-driven product decisions. But the planning process doesn’t stop once those decisions are signed off. In fact, it may be just the beginning. There are a couple of reasons for this:

1. Customer feedback uncovered during the development phase could challenge planners’ assumptions
2. Sudden or unexpected changes can occur in the market place, economy or competitive landscape

And so, the fifth and final ingredient in our recipe is: Make the innovation process iterative.

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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The product is obsolete.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.

Recapping the past week and introducing the next.

Recap
If you haven’t been following our blog, now is a good time to jump in! We’ve got an exciting series started on Creating the Optimal Product Strategy, five ingredients to transform your product innovation activities into a core business process. The first of five weekly Wednesday posts, The Innovation Framework is a informative read. Ingredient two will post next week, so stay tuned!

The Next
Next Week we are pleased to present a webinar featuring Brian Lawley, the President and founder of the 280 Group, a Product Management services firm, and President of the Silicon Valley Product Management Association, the world’s largest Product Management Association.

Transparency: Best Practices in Product Requirements Management is the second in our 5-part Transparency Series featuring best practices to help product managers increase organizational agility and enable faster, confident decision-making. Brian will share real-world stories, best practices, and lessons learned on how critical total alignment of your product development processes can make the difference between achieving time-to-profit or market failure.

Mr. Lawley is the Author of the Book Expert Product Management: Advanced Techniques, Tips & Strategies for Product Management & Product Marketing and The Phenomenal Product Manager. We may even give a few copies of one of his books away to those that attend the webinar! Follow us on twitter for the latest details. Feel free to register for this webinar today!

As promised, here is the first of five ingredients for your plan to transform product innovation activities into a core business process.
One of the toughest, yet most important steps you need to take is to get senior management and all product-related departments on the same page. It’s tough because you’ll need to align the objectives and metrics for product development with the company’s overall business goals. And that will ruffle some feathers.

You begin by creating an integrated product innovation framework. The framework specifies the limits of what your product departments should and should not consider as investment candidates. And it helps cross-functional product teams target their work where it is the most beneficial (meaning, “profitable”).

The elements of the framework are…

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