In response to your “job mapping” post, you’re definitely on to something there. I’m a big fan of the “disruptive innovation” theory that Professor Clayton Christensen has written so much about in books like “The Innovator’s Solution” et al, and that Innosight (his consulting company) puts into practice.

Taking a “jobs to be done” point of view is a good first step. I believe an even better second step is to understand “customer outcomes”; i.e., what happens to customers as they use a product (ours or a competitor’s) in getting that job done.

One of my favorite books on the topic is “What Customers Want: Using Outcome-driven Innovation To Create Breakthrough Products and Services’ by Anthony Ulwick.

By concentrating on what happens (the “outcomes”) when a product is used to get a particular job done, both positive outcomes (we call those “benefits” and tout them , and the unintended negative consequences of using that product, we gain clarity about where innovation matters most to customers – at least customers trying to get those jobs done in their life.

So yes, I’m a big fan of jobs-based innovation, especially when augmented with outcome-centric innovation.

Once again, though, it’s critically-important in practice to ensure that whatever customer jobs we choose to focus on (at the exclusion of others that could be suboptimized in the process), that we have go-to-market alignment to ensure that the company, its marketing and salesforce is committed to following through on those innovations to fully capitalize on these tradeoff decisions.

As you can probably tell, I’ve found myself in situation where we did a marvelous job at innovating in one area, only to find that the go-to-market engine wasn’t fully aboard or shifted priorities by the time we could bring the new innovation to market – not a lot of fun…

I’m looking forward to the balance of the posts on innovation.

I agree. It is very easy to say and hard (or at least a lot of work) to do.

In my experience, it starts by asking the right people the right questions…once you have the right business objectives in sight.

First, about where we need to take our product and business.

For example, when I was VP Product Management at Citrix, we had determined that we were a “mile wide and an inch deep” in accounts; in other words, we needed to go from “tactical adoption” to “strategic adoption” and “standardization” in accounts.

So I asked the question, “OK. So what’s preventing our customers from standardizing on our products?” My PM team had no idea. So I told them to go find out.

3 months later, after 3 customer focus groups in 3 major cities across the U.S. and numerous meetings with resellers who had their own points of view, we had the answers.

Next, we reprioritized most of our product roadmap to eliminate the remaining “barriers to adoption” by enterprises. 18 months later, we went from being in a defensive posture with our customer council members to getting positive feedback and confirmation that our roadmap was properly trained on their biggest remaining issues.

It is hard to do, but it is possible. It starts by having the right strategic objective (like deeper account penetration, in our case), then asking ourselves and customers the right questions, then making a lot of tough tradeoffs to get there.

But then being in Product Management, you probably realize all this.

The thing I find is that many teams aren’t willing to say No to some market segments and sacrifice those customers in order to dominate in other segments. Of course, when we do this, we’d better be right!

Alas, one of the hardest lessons I learned as a technologist (the hard way, unfortunately) is to be very careful which customers we focus on when asking these questions, and to ensure there’s enough samples to be truly projectible across the entire market.

I’ve become a big fan of proper market research over the years. There’s really no substitute for actually having the facts when making PM decisions.

Fortunately for me in this instance, our senior management team had done their homework and had decided going deeper into the enterprise was the right strategic direction. And “enterprise standardization” had become a corporate imperative, which ensured we had proper go-to-market alignment that the product changes we made could benefit from.

It’s tough to get all the internal planets lined up like this, but when we do, the results can be truly amazing.

I not sure, but I may have found a way to do this – you will have to be the judge. I’ve got a 3-part posting coming up that talks about “job mapping”. Take a look and let me know what you think. The first posting has been published at:

http://www.theaccidentalpm.com/features/a-new-way-for-product-managers-to-discover-breakthrough-product-features

I totally agree. In tough times, the tough get going. Focusing on the customer is the key, in both good times and bad.

When in doubt, ask the customers and look for where they’ve shifted their priorities and follow them by matching and mirroring what they want most, and you’ll almost always be successful (I say ‘almost’ because there’s always an exception in everything).