I am co-presenting a webinar next Thursday called ‘The Guide to Win/Loss Analysis for More Successful Products’ along with Steve Johnson of Primary Intelligence. In preparation for the presentation, I have given a lot of thought to the benefits of win/loss and why all of you product people out there should care.

The New York Times in the span of 4 days put out super biting articles about how Sony is expecting big losses again and has missed the Tech Parade.

Is there something Sony could have done to avoid the mess they are in? We here at Accept wonder if things might have different if Sony did a better job listening to customers.

It’s clear that open innovation today is more than just a buzzword.  Over the past few years, companies like P&G, Unilever, Intuit, and Shell have all launched open innovation programs focused at getting customers and consumers alike to get involved in creating new and improved products. These programs are great for building relationships with customers and ensuring products are aligned with their market.

Nothing is more frustrating than putting time and effort into a project only to find out that the idea has been scrapped. This is part of the price of doing business… to a point. But repeated last minute direction changes without an adequate explanation of why start to wear on employees’ motivation to do their job and do it right.

The latest from our #360webinar channel- we’re launching a brand new three-part webinar series called Modernizing Product Planning! We’re sponsoring this program from April 19-May 10 to educate product professionals about the need to modernize product planning practices.

Just caught this great article in the Economist about when products flop (fail spectacularly) in the market. This is on the heels of the most recent flop courtesy of the good folks at Disney Films, John Carter. $300M in $30M out. Ouch! Even for a company as large as Disney that one hurts.

One point the article makes is that in business, occasional flops walk hand in hand with successful products. Nothing ventured, nothing gained as it were. It's true that sometimes it takes a big risk to make a big hit. Still I wouldn't want to be the producer of the John Carter movie right about now. He just blew $300M; let another guy make that mistake.

We have entered the era of big data and are experiencing its major implications on the way we do business firsthand. According to this McKinsey article (available with a free registration), “companies with more than 1,000 employees store, on average, over 235 terabytes of data- more data than is contained in the US Library of Congress.”

A couple major trends are impacting the world of product companies today. Products are more technologically advanced than ever and are being conceived, planned and developed by teams spread all over the world. Pressure from competition continues to grow while at the same time, business are given less resources to work with. Making faster, better and cheaper products is a tall order so companies are beginning to rethink their approach to product planning as a way to gain business advantage.