As we continue our poll series to understand the priorities and challenges that product executives face (and yes, I am still obsessed with polling data as we draw closer to election season), I wanted to share the results from the second poll – like the first poll there were over 200 responses and represented a pretty solid cross-section of product management, marketing and development roles across all types of industries and geographies.

Here are the results: About 41 percent of total respondents, and 45 percent of large organizations, said less than 50 percent of product ideas come from customers, partners and suppliers.
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Being responsible for Accept’s Product Marketing function, I am continually trying to understand what product executives and brand owners are doing to bring those profitable products to market and what’s keeping them up at night. A few weeks ago we kicked off a series of online polls to understand these priorities and challenges that product executives face. Since its mid-term political season and I’m currently obsessed with polling data, I wanted to share the results from the first poll – which are very insightful. It’s worth noting that the poll had over 200 responses and represented a pretty solid cross-section of product management, marketing and development roles across all types of industries and geographies.

Here is the first poll question and the results:
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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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So far in this series of posts, I’ve described three ingredients for turning innovation into a core business process:

1. Create an integrated product innovation framework
2. Replace the many truths with a single, shared truth
3. Embrace the voice of your customer

This trio lays the foundation: It defines the process ground rules. It ensures that there’s transparency throughout the organization. And it opens the door to discovering what the market really needs.

The fourth ingredient ties it all together, and is simply this: Make objective decisions based on what is best for the company.

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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.