When it comes to innovation, I have been guilty of thinking only in one dimension. I have mostly focused only on new features and functionality changes in my products that differentiate it from the competition. I know I am not the only product manager with this limitation.

However, not envisioning a new initiative as a whole new business process may result in failure. A good product may target the wrong buyer in the right segment, a marketing message could hit the wrong audience, a sales force may react negatively to your new solution.

So it is worth mentioning when a tool is available to help product managers think more systematically at an early stage of their innovation process.

Such is the case with the “Innovation Radar” presented in a complete fashion in “Grow from Within”, a book from Robert C. Wolcott and Michael J. Lippiz published in 2009. The Innovation Radar forces you to look at innovation in 12 different ways and encourages product managers to adopt a comprehensive view of their innovation initiative. The book is tackling a more general topic: investigate what makes an intrapreneur successful and the innovation radar is only a chapter of the book. Great read nonetheless.

The goal of this post is not to extensively discuss the model, as I could not do it as well as the authors.  However, in this post, I will provide a brief description of the Innovation Radar and help you imagine how you can apply the model to:

• Innovate with your existing products
• Build a comprehensive approach for developing new products
• Anticipate avenues that your competitors could take

So in order to discuss the Innovation Radar, please look at the illustration above, which is directly taken from the book. There are 4 major dimensions, Offering (What), Customers (Who), Processes (How) and Presence (Where). The other 8 dimensions are distributed between these 4 dimensions based on their type of impact. For example, the customer experience is obviously between “Customers” and “Process.” Let’s go through each dimension, with a short explanation and a few questions you can ask yourself about it:

1 Offerings: Creating unique products or services that are valued by customers. What unique architecture or feature set can we bring to our customers? That’s the dimension most of us focus on.

2 Platforms: Common components which can be developed and reused for multiple markets or customers. What are the common technologies, architectures and modules which can be shared by my customer base to reduce my costs?

3 Solutions: Customized, integrated set of products and services to solve a customer’s specific business problem. Can I package my offering differently in order to simplify, bring more flexibility, or reduce cost  in order to attract different buyers?

4 Customers: Discover new customer categories, different buyer personas, or unmet/unarticulated needs. Could there be unidentified business problems your customers may be facing?Is there an unserved up- or down-market?

5 Customer experience: Everything each actor in the sales cycle and end users see or feel about your product and your company. What collateral would resonate with my audience? Can I simplify the user interface to address a new segment? What type of support do I need for this new audience?

6 Value Capture: The mechanisms a company creates to earn its share of the market. How can we redesign the sales cycle in increase our margins? What pricing model leads to optimal profit margin?

7 Processes: The configuration of business activities to conduct operations. How can I reorganize support to reduce costs? Can I develop a single methodology which can be reused for a specific class of services?

8 Organization: How the company structures itself to respond to the needs of the customer. Will this new concept benefit from an internal, separate organization that can execute faster? Are the proper incentives in place to ensure that each team member delivers on the strategy?

9 Supply Chain: The method to deliver product and services. What could be automated, or configured by the customer to provide faster delivery, cheaper cost or improved flexibility?

10 Presence: Channels employed by the company to bring the offering to the market. Should I replace my “farmers” account managers by “hunters”? How can I integrate my offering into a partner’s larger solution and use that partner as a new channel?

11 Network: How a company or product can connect to the customer to improve the value of the product. Can different types of users in my installed base benefit from my existing products? What interfaces should I build to leverage a partner’s solution and unleash new value for my customer?

12 Brand: Symbols, words or marks used by a company to communicate a promise or an image to the customer. How can the company’s brand be leveraged to reinforce the new concept? Would my audience feel that the innovation falls naturally within the brand, or would it be considered a stretch?

The true value of the tool is that, when used correctly, it forces you to envision many of your innovative product’s implications upfront.

Gather a multidisciplinary team in one room for a brainstorming session and go through a series of questions which you will have carefully prepared in advance for each dimension listed above. Be careful not to lead your audience or you will kill creativity. Together, in a few hours and under your lead, the team can minimize the surprises your innovation will produce and define what’s needed, rather than forcing you to operate later with a set of options limited by your budget and time-to-market imperatives. That could mean the difference between success and failure. And maybe you may even find new ways to innovate in the process.

One of the biggest challenges I’ve faced as a product manager is attempting to arrive at a consensus when identifying what enhancements, bug fixes and other development items should be included in the product roadmap. Perhaps you, too, will identify with a few of the themes in this *mostly* fictional dramatization…

Bob, a product manager at Ultramegadyn, spent the last week combing emails, Excel spreadsheets, defect tracking systems and post-it notes accumulating all the product ideas that have been sent his way over the last year.

The result can be summed up in one word. Whoa.

Bob’s got way more ideas for things to be done than could possibly be addressed in the next several hundred, if not thousand years.  So as a good product manager, he starts whittling down the list. He’d like to grow revenues by expanding into a new market, so he includes these capabilities. He also includes some tweaks to existing functionality to respond to competitive pressures. Sprinkle in some 24×7 availability and he’s done in time for lunch.

Bob’s still feeling pretty good about himself when he starts circulating his roadmap presentation with other parts of the organization. Only then does he realize the extent of his troubles as the sales team starts asking what he’s going to do about the laundry list of enhancements they need to placate a certain large customer. Next, the Director of Product Development starts mumbling about man-years and hardware costs just before she falls out of her chair. Bob get’s back to his desk and finds a voice mail from the VP of Technical Support. He’s complaining that product management never includes his team in any product strategy decisions and that they need a number of enhancements to make the product easier to support. Bob sits back and thinks to himself, “Wow that was fast – if only our case resolution times were that quick.”

So what is Bob going to do to salvage his once promising career in product management?

Well, selecting the right development investments to be included in a product roadmap is an exercise in multiple-objective decision making. Difficulty occurs because seldom is one investment best in every dimension. For instance, a given enhancement may translate into increased revenues, but may be very expensive for the organization to develop, may not align with strategic objectives or your own product strategy.

The best way to sort through all the alternatives is by creating a scoring system to help you (and the rest of the organization) understand how each investment decision ranks when evaluated against key organizational objectives.

Not only does a scoring system make it easier to determine which enhancements should be included in the roadmap (by picking those with the highest scores), it provides a platform for collaborating with other groups and achieving organizational consensus. This is because the decision criteria are set out for everyone to see. Instead of having a subjective debate over pet projects, which will only lead to the parties entrenching positions, feedback will come in the form of new or modified objectives, weights and scores. The following four steps will guide you through the process:

Step 1: Identify Objectives

A good way to start is by reviewing your own product strategy, along with departmental and corporate objectives. If you’re doing it right, your roadmap items should have an impact on these things. For example, product investments will better differentiate your company, grow revenue or market share, reduce support costs, or help win XYZ account. You’ll also want to include objectives from other parts of the organization so that their interests are represented. Lastly, try not to double count by including redundant objectives. You would not want to include an objective that counts revenue and another one that counts incremental sales.

Step 2: Measure Investment Candidates Against Each Objective

For each candidate feature, you’ll want to assign a score for each objective. In the example above, I’ve used a range of 0 to 10, with 10 being the best. In this way, you can see that Feature 1 is expected to contribute to High Revenue Growth, but since it has a score of 2 for Low Development Cost, we can assume that it must be a fairly expensive project to complete. Obviously, score ranges must be calibrated using values that make sense for your organization – for instance, a company with $500 million in revenue may find a range of $0 to $100 million appropriate for the High Revenue Growth objective, but this range is likely too small for a company with $15 billion in sales. Also, be sure to include this information in a scoring key to guide those that will be working with the model.

Right about now you may be asking the question, “What about business cases?” and I’m glad you did. Roadmaps help you plan and articulate your product strategy for the next three to five years. The farther we look down the road, the greater the inherent uncertainty; thus, roadmaps must be somewhat fluid in order to appropriately respond to changing market dynamics. Thus, we need a system to quickly evaluate interesting opportunities for inclusion in the roadmap. Some may argue that the business case should be used for this task. However, I find that while business cases are a great tool for assessing the appropriateness of near-term investments, they are too time-consuming and assumption-laden to be useful for road-mapping. Using the 10 point scale is a good way to ballpark our expectations and is an acceptable proxy for the business case.

Step 3: Determine Objective Weights

Next you need to determine the objective weights so that they reflect the priorities of the organization. All the weights, when summed, should total 1.0 and reflect the importance of the objective relative to all the others. Our example weights High Revenue Growth at 0.40, which means that the organization values revenue 4 times more than it does Supports Product Line Integration which is weighted at only 0.10.

It is often helpful to tie objective weights to those of the larger organization, since taking a corporate position will help reduce the squabbling that may occur among stakeholders. If your company practices management-by-objective (MBO), you may have already been handed a framework to start with.  Review the five or so corporate-level objectives – they’re probably on that little card next to your computer monitor. Chances are successfully achieving these objectives is rewarded by funding a certain percentage share of an annual bonus pool. These percentages are actually implicit weights, which you can then leverage for use in your scoring system.

Step 4: Apply Scoring System

Once you have all the scores and weights, you can tabulate the total score for each feature. This is done by calculating the weighted average.

Feature 1:           10 x 0.40 + 2 x 0.30 + 3 x 0.15 + 8 x 0.10 + 5 x 0.05 = 6.1

Do this for all your features and then sort descending by Total Score. Presto! The candidates at the top of your list are the best ones for inclusion in your roadmap.

Do your results square with your intuition? With stakeholder expectations?

If they don’t you might have a poor analytical model on your hands, but don’t worry; you’ll probably need to take your model through a few iterations to get it just right.

Here are some things to look out for. For one, you need to mercilessly eliminate redundant objectives. As I mentioned before, this will cause double counting and throw off your results. Secondly, you want to make sure that your weights accurately reflect an objective’s relative importance. Over or under valuing an objective will also throw off the score. Lastly, it’s easy to focus on objectives that lend themselves to being quantified, but don’t overlook “soft” objectives that may be important to the organization. Your model will also benefit from the input of others who may help you identify missing objectives and weighting problems. At the conclusion, all parties should understand and agree with the model – even if they don’t like the all the results.

Using this technique for roadmap planning can make the process a whole lot more efficient and collaborative while getting the best product possible out. It is also a way for stakeholder to be part of the process and champion your product in their respective departments.  Not to mention it’s a lot more effective than looking angrily in the rear-view mirror and yelling, “You all are cruising for a bruising; don’t make me come back there!”

Communication is a big part of being a Product Manager, whether you’re attempting to convey the significance of a business pain, the impact of a value proposition, the creative nature of a solution, or the accessibility of information created by a product. In this regard, infographics can be a big help.

As defined by Wikipedia, Information graphics or infographics are visual representations of information, data or knowledge. These graphics are used where complex information needs to be explained quickly and clearly, such as in signs, maps, journalism, technical writing, and education. They are also used extensively as tools by computer scientists, mathematicians, and statisticians to ease the process of developing and communicating conceptual information. Employing this vivid way of conveying information may just be the ticket you need to help differentiate yourself as a product manager and your products.

Chances are you’re already familiar with infographics from the pages of USA Today, Wired Magazine, and other popular media, but make no mistake, infographics are not a new phenomenon. John Snow, a British physician considered to be one of the fathers of epidemiology, was perhaps one of the first to gain insight from the use of infographics. In 1854, he successfully traced the source of a cholera outbreak in Soho, England to a public water pump on Broad Street. At the time, it was thought that cholera was caused by pollution or “bad air.” Skeptical of this theory, Snow plotted cholera cases on a map of the city and was then able to determine the true source of the outbreak and conclude that the disease is actually water borne.

More recently, Edward Tufte, an American statistician and Professor Emeritus of statistics, information design, interface design and political economy at Yale University, has championed visual communication of information. He has authored a number of influential books on the subject, starting with, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, published in 1983.

So while information graphics are not new, something interesting is happening. They are experiencing an increase in cultural awareness and use as indicated by Google Trends.

Why is this?

The answer, I believe, is information overload. As more information and data is made available for consumption, individuals are looking for better ways to manage and process it. Infographics are a useful tool in this regard, especially in the case of business software and web applications. An effective use of infographics will make your product easier to learn and use while enabling your customers to make better decisions. They may also be a great opportunity to differentiate your solution from that of your competitors.

I’ve employed infographics in a few of the products that I’ve managed to this end. For starters, let’s take a relatively simple implementation – a utility that helps database administrators identify differences between databases. The comparison results fall into four categories:

1. the database object (such as a table) only exists on the source
2. the object only exists on the target
3. the object exists in both environments and they are the same
4. the objects are present in both databases, but they are different

These cases are identified using the four different icons shown in the upper left corner (and the results column) of the window.

A more elaborate example comes from a performance monitoring product I managed that graphically renders the operational structure of a database (in this case, IBM DB2). Here, components of the database such as the number of users, memory allocation, processes and disk space are represented by various icons. They are then connected by flows to illustrate how rapidly data is moving through the system. Superimposed over the flows are line charts, so the user can see what’s going on right now and compare it to historical values.

This display method works equally well for junior database administrators (as a learning tool) and seasoned database experts (as a rapid way to asses the overall system health).

Information graphics have also attracted the attention and investment of some influential technology leaders. Many Eyes is an IBM Research project and website whose stated goal is to democratize information and to enable social data analysis (“social” in the sense of Web 2.0), by making it easy for laypeople to create, edit, share and discuss each other’s information visualizations. Google is in on the fun too, as they acquired Gapminder.org’s Trendalyzer in 2007 and turned it into a Motion Chart Gadget for Google Spreadsheet.

Be sure to take advantage of this trend and give some thought to how infographics might improve the user experience of your products when updating your roadmaps. Including new ways to display and visualize data in your next release might be what you need to excite sales and prospects.