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:

An awesome topic, worthy of a webinar.
Just a reminder that tomorrow we host the final webinar in our Transparency series, featuring Tom Grant [@TomGrantForr], Sr. Research Analyst at Forrester Research.

DMNews originally posted my commentary on the iPhone 4 issues in the July 26th issue. They were kind enough to let us repost our comments here to share with our readers.

Ever since the antenna problems in the iPhone 4 were first uncovered, there’s been a plethora of experts and consumers insisting Apple is making mistakes that will cause long-lasting damage to the brand.

One mistake they made was briefly mentioned by Steve Jobs at the company’s press conference: the break in the external antenna that forms the casing clearly indicates where to put your finger to drop a call. What could have been a product feature to help users from interrupting the signal strength was unexplained and misunderstood by the public.

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.

Tom Grant at Forrester writes an excellent blog on product management, in which he recently graced us by mentioning Accept in his post on "The Unrecognized Success of the Requirements Tool Market." To be sure, awareness for solutions like ours is growing fast. In fact in our latest earnings announcement we highlighted record financial results and aggressive expansion plans.

Tom asks his readers why there's a sudden interest in requirements tools and the business problem they're tied to. You'll have to read Tom's blog to get his own answer to the question in an upcoming post, but we also thought we'd let you know what we think here.

Innovation has been the lifeblood of high-tech companies, so why is interest on the rise just now?

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...

What are the RIGHT requirements? It used to be you planned a release and listed the must-haves and got them... Eventually

But with agile we get the product backlog faster... Yeah? i.e are those the Right requirements?

Who owns the definition of the right requirements?

For those of you who attended the Tom Grant webinar recently, thank you, your participation made it a success. As is usually the case, we received more questions than Tom was able to respond to during the duration of the webinar.

However, Tom has very graciously responded to your unanswered questions.